


See Them Dancing

by apropensityforcharm



Category: Glee
Genre: Fantasy, Hybrid AU, Kurt-Blaine Reversebang 2014, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:52:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1884309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apropensityforcharm/pseuds/apropensityforcharm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blaine is Cecaelian - half octopus, half human. All his life, he's lived in his reef and explored his boundaries, and all his life he's heard stories about the ocean's most vicious predators: Galeos. Half shark, half human and with all the worst traits combined, the Galeos are infamously feared and when a tribe moves into the caves nearby, Blaine is rightly terrified. And then he meets Kurt, who is nothing like anything he would have expected of the great beasts, and he finds himself questioning everything he was ever taught.</p><p>Written for the Kurt-Blaine Reversebang 2014.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the Kurt-Blaine Reversebang Challenge. I worked with the lovely Val i-wanna-be-a-klaine-ship-ranger over on Tumblr, who was wonderful and patient and didn't get annoyed when I sent her long and rambly emails about the most boring of writerly woes. Thank you. <3 Her art is absolutely gorgeous and you should go visit her tumblr and shower her with praise, if you haven't already.
> 
> Despite the plethora of possibilities presented within this universe, this story is about as tame as they come. As in, there's no tentacle porn to be found here. Sorry. (Or, you're welcome?) Blaine is based on the Cecaelia, a race of octopus-elves found in obscure Japanese mythology. There doesn't appear to be any such thing as a shark-human, so Kurt's race is entirely made up, which is blasphemy because how badass are shark hybrids? For the record, 'Galeos' is old Greek for shark. Original, I know.
> 
> Finally, I think I deserve some credit for not making more Little Mermaid jokes than I did. It was a struggle. Although the title IS shamelessly stolen from Part Of Your World. 
> 
> If, per chance, you'd like to chat, then I'm over at apropensityforcharm on tumblr - come say hi!

Blaine Anderson was five years old when he’d headed to the surface of the ocean for the very first time. He shouldn’t have been up there, per se – he should have been sticking close to his parents’ sides while they waited in the shadows for fish to catch, but they’d been distracted and he’d been bored; too long sitting still for a little boy with such energy. He’d set about playing a game teasing the anemone nearby with his tentacles, and then he’d looked up, and he’d seen the sunlight.

He’d been mesmerised by the way the light seemed to dance and scatter all through the water, jumping and playing while far above them the waves pounded their steady rhythm into the earth like a heartbeat. He’d never seen anything like it, these strange and ghostly rays of gold stretching like fingers into the blue of the ocean. Blaine had spent almost his entire childhood thus far exploring the caves near his home in the reef, dragging his friends on expeditions across the ocean floor to so many new places that they hadn’t yet been, but he’d never been to the surface. His parents had warned him that dangerous things lived up in the waves, and even more dangerous were the ones that didn’t live in the water at all. Blaine had been expressly forbidden from ever walking on land.

But – Blaine was five years old and had all the curiosity to fit, and he was bored.

A quick glance at his parents assured him that their full attention was focused on their hunt for food, and so Blaine had shuttled away as fast and quietly as possible, throwing in a little camouflage for good measure. Nothing more ostentatious than bright orange skin. He’d propelled himself up, and up, and up, his heart hammering in his throat as the water around him steadily lightened – indigo, navy, marine, cerulean – and then his head broke the surface of the waves and he’d felt the cool air on his skin for the first time.

Blaine had stayed up there for longer than he realised, paddling vertically in the water while he took in the sights around him. There had been so much blue, the whole sky had been full of it, and the water too, all that blue stretched as far as he could see in every direction. But where was the yellow? Where was the yellow he’d spotted underneath the water? He’d twisted around in the water, bobbing up on the swell of a wave, and when he’d looked up, it was there. Brighter than Blaine could have ever imagined was the sun. And the sight of it had captured him.

When he eventually had the mind to go back down beneath the waves, he’d found his parents frantic and hysterical, because apparently he’d been gone for over an hour. They’d demanded to know where he’d been and because five-year-old Blaine hadn’t been the most adept liar, he’d told them. When his parents realised where he’d gone, they’d been furious and grounded him, shamed faced, to his own cave for the next two weeks. But that one taste of the open air had been like a drug to Blaine, and a few months later he found himself up there again, this time without parents to keep an eye on him. And that had been the start of his trips to the surface.


	2. Chapter 2

Fourteen years later, Blaine is still that same boy, fascinated with the world above the waves. He spends his childhood wandering off alone to the shore whenever he can get away from his parents, exploring the rocks on the land for new creatures and places to learn about. The rocks are quiet and Blaine is always the largest creature around with his long, thick tentacles, but for the most part the animals he find seem to view him as a friend – this strange creature who is half octopus and half human. They let him be as long as he doesn’t disturb them.

Blaine had never had the courage to go beyond the rocks whenever he was up there. A couple of hundred metres back from the shoreline are a mass of tall plants that his grandmother tells him are called trees, but the idea of venturing into those towering things with their menacing shadows and outstretched arms makes him shiver. Just like any other Cecaelian child, Blaine has heard more than enough stories from his parents about the sorts of horrors that live on dry earth, like humans with their weapons and waste. He’s mostly content to stick to the rocks just barely on shore, wet beneath his tentacles due to the relentless assault of the waves. He spends his days up above the reef as often as he can get away with, his parents no longer able to simply ground him when he misbehaves, and he explores and he learns and he thinks and he wonders.

On one such day, Blaine is lying half in half out of the water, relaxing in a little horseshoe shaped alcove amongst the rock pools, his eyes closed while he soaks up the afternoon sun. Blaine loves the sun – never enough of it down in the depths of the ocean where the rays of light and warmth can hardly reach. He doesn’t even want to think about further down, where the animals live that have never known warmth at all, their skin bleached and tender, their eyes huge and luminous. Blaine loves the sun. He loves the heat and the light and the way it casts shadows in interesting patterns over the ground. It’s addictive.

His tentacles flick lazily in the water, creating rivets and ripples while he tilts his head back and sinks down a little further. The water is warm and welcoming and around him tiny fish flutter past in short, jerking movements, trapped in the rock pool until the tide comes up again to let them free. They don’t pay him much attention, used to his presence even as they avoid his tentacles warily because in their experience tentacles have always signalled predator. Not that they’re wrong – but Blaine would never bother himself with fish as small as these.

He sighs and drags himself up on his arms. He should really be getting back to his community. His friends learnt a long time ago not to worry when he disappears for hours at a time, but he has his duties he has to fulfil before the day is out. The thought of it makes his nose wrinkle.

In the water, movement becomes that much faster, just as it always does. Despite the fact that Blaine’s lungs are designed for life above water (leftover evolutionary trait, his grandmother says, from when their human ancestors migrated to the sea), open air always has the slightest edge of resistance when he moves through it, pushing against him in that subtle message of  _you don’t belong here_. In contrast, the water splits around his body seamlessly while he makes his way along the ocean floor. The reef of his home is a little way off, just visible in the distance through the clear shallow water, a thriving community of sea life and activity, and he’s just started towards it when he sees – them.

Dark shapes, almost invisible in the murkiness of the deeper ocean water, too many to count and heading straight for Blaine. He squints, attempts to make out the shapes clearer – they don’t have the wavering, ever shifting pattern of a school of fish and though he feels a thrill of excitement when he entertains the possibility of whales, the singular shapes aren’t big enough for that. Dolphins, then?

He watches the way the shapes move through the water, still undefined but gaining detail every moment. They move like fish, not dolphins, side to side instead of up and down, and there is something predatory about the confidence and purpose with which they move. As Blaine watches, he observes that there’s something off about the way these fish are holding themselves – slightly upright instead of straight across. And then one of the fish extends its  _arm_ ,and Blaine’s blood runs cold.

He’s heard of them before. Never seen them, and as far as he know no one else in his community has seen them either, not even the ancient Cecaelia who live in the protected coves hidden from the ocean. But he’s heard the stories. _Everyone’s_ heard the stories.

Galeos... they’re a different sort of people. Half human and half shark, and all the worst characteristics between them. Blaine remembers when he was little and he would hear tales that had travelled from half way across the ocean, passed from creature to creature in hushed whispers and furtive looks, secrets that the whole reef knew. He once heard about a Galeos, three metres long and a metre wide, who ripped a Cecealia limb from limb for fun, liked to hear the poor creature’s screams before it ate. And when he was thirteen there were a whole slew of new stories because apparently there was activity in nearby neighbourhoods, which had only made him even more scared. He’d not been able to sleep at night for weeks after that, terrified and utterly certain that one of the great sharks would come for him in his cove to eat him in the most sadistic way possible.

Out of all of the hundreds of horrifying sea monsters to pick from, the Galeos must be the most infamous. Vicious, predatory and cruel, they are the tyrants of the sea. And now they’re here.

Blaine fades without even thinking about it, camouflages his body to the same paleness of the sand beneath him. He flattens himself to the ground so that his limbs spread like a starfish. He doesn’t even realise how hard he’s breathing until he can feel it, thrumming fast through his body.

The Galeos are close enough now that Blaine can see their faces, flat and cold with large, solid black eyes, pointed ears stretching back and long lines of gills running like open gashes down the sides of their necks. The front half of their body is human just like Blaine, although they have hands and fingers where Blaine has the tapered end of a tentacle. But from the chest down, their waists transition smoothly into a shark’s powerful torso, slate grey and sleekly muscled, leading to a sharply angled tail that slices effortlessly through the water.

When the sharks pass overhead so close that Blaine can see the imperfections of their skin, the scars and marks of life, his lungs won’t even allow him to draw a breath. He closes his eyes tight, feels the push of their bodies through the water, and hopes to god that they don’t look down.

They don’t. Out of some mercy, not one of them is distracted enough to look away from their route ahead. That or Blaine’s camouflage is better than he would have guessed. When he gains the courage to raise his head and open his eyes, the tribe of Galeos are murky, half-formed shapes in the distance once more. Blaine begins breathing again.

When he tears his way into the reef, sending up plumes of sand to hang in the water behind him, his friends are grouped in the corner of one of the sand banks at the entrance and call out to him when they see him.

‘Blaine, my man!’ Artie greets when he makes his way over, breathless and weak limbed. Artie, with his damaged tentacles all mangled and stunted. Artie, who will be the first to go when the Galeos come calling. ‘Where’ve you been at?’

Tina rolls her eyes and flicks her fringe away from her face. ‘Pulling the mystery explorer gig again, duh. Right, Blaine?’

As per usual, neither of them are observant enough to recognise his obvious distress.

Mike, thankfully, is more liable to actually pay attention to the people in front of him. He tilts his head and his hair sways in the water as he watches Blaine’s short and fast breaths, his wide eyes, the way his whole body is trembling. ‘Blaine, man – what’s up?’

Blaine is only able to shake his head, holding a tentacle tight to his chest while he tries to catch his breath. His heart is still pounding so hard he can literally see the movements beneath his skin and his mind is a cacophony of a dozen colliding thoughts, a dozen upset emotions racing their way through his brain while he tries to calm down enough for speech. He’s shaking so violently he feels like he might fall over, and interspersed between all those thoughts – so many thoughts – are the glimpses of the faces of the Galeos passing above him. Flat, emotionless... so cruel.

Somebody needs to know about this other than Blaine.

‘ _Galeos_ ,’ he manages to gasp out. ‘Outside the reef – Galeos – here – ‘

For a moment, there is silence while his friends stare at him. They look surprised and wide-eyed, motionless in their astonishment. Blaine knows that they will have heard as many stories as him. Hell, Artie and Tina were the ones who made up half of them to scare their peers. They _’_ ll realise how serious this is, right? And then –

Tina scoffs and rolls her eyes again and Artie doesn’t even try to hold back a grin. Even Mike looks uncomfortable and he won’t meet Blaine’s eyes, shifting on his tentacles in an embarrassed fashion.

They don’t believe him. And it’s not like Blaine can blame them, because for as long as they’ve been alive the Galeos have been as good as ghost stories to them – there’s never been any serious reason to fear them. But Blaine thinks of those long, lithe bodies he saw, the raw power held in even just their tails, and he doesn’t know how to express how much this is _not a joke_ to his friends.

‘Fine,’ he snaps. ‘You know what, I’m going to take my news to the _Elders,_ because maybe _they’ll_ take me more seriously!’

And he storms off again towards the caves that hold council over the reefs, fuming and hurt over his friends’ disbelief, and still inside that fear of the threat – the threat he _knows_ is real – grows ever larger.

\--

‘ _Hummel!_ Jesus Christ, is anyone even living in that tiny little brain of yours? _Hello?_ ’

Kurt knows that voice. Kurt should probably respond to that voice, if only to shed himself of the she-devil for a blissful ten minutes. But Kurt has been stolidly ignoring that voice for the better part of five minutes, eyes determinedly shut, because all he wants to do is sleep and god knows that’s not going to happen if he lets her have her way.

Of course, it’s a lot harder to ignore sharp teeth pulling at his ear. He jerks away in irritation. ‘ _What,_ Santana?’

‘God, PMS much?’ Santana cackles and skips back hurriedly in the water when Kurt swings at her loutishly, grumpy in his tiredness. Not that anyone else is any different, of course – travelling miles across the ocean without rest has exhausted his whole tribe. The mage that they’d come across in the merpeople colony an hour out had been helpful with her potion for liveliness, but it hadn’t helped them for long, and before a couple of hours were gone they were tired as ever. Except for Santana, apparently, who is as wickedly gleeful in her energy as usual. It does not endear Kurt to his friend and god knows he is not in the mood to put up with her incessant prodding.

Of course, if he lets her know that, it’ll only add water to the waterfall.

‘Did you need something?’ Kurt says, polite through gritted teeth.

Santana’s grin contains the sharp edge of viciousness. ‘There’s drama up ahead, baby. Those eight legged freaks down in the reef have caught current of us and now they’re throwing a spaz tryna kick us out.’

‘Says who?’ Kurt frowns.

‘Puck.’

‘Oh, yes, and obviously Puck is the most reliable source of knowledge,’ Kurt snarks, rolling his eyes. God. He just wants to _sleep._ And possibly lock Santana in one of the cages they’d come across amongst that shipwreck on their way to the shore.

Santana only shrugs. ‘Come see for yourself if you want. They’re throwing up a real hissy fit like right outside your cave.’

Reluctantly, Kurt follows Santana’s dark silhouette out from his nice quiet cave into the open water, while his muscles let him know _exactly_ how much they disapprove of his actions. His eyes droop in his exhaustion and mostly he just really wishes that Santana would learn to leave him alone when he needs his rest, because he doesn’t need to be alerted to every little tiff going on in the tribe.

Outside, the situation is more or less exactly what he hadn’t expected to see.

His tribe has collected in a semicircle in the makeshift central congregation area in the middle of the ring of caves. They’re crowded around a spectacle that he can’t see through the thickets of their bodies; they hang forcibly still in the water and Kurt can sense their tension even though he can’t see their faces – can see it in the severe lines of their spines, the way their tails jerk back and forth in aggressively small movements, as little as possible to keep them afloat. Directly in front of him, a tribeswoman is holding onto a hunting pike with a hand so tight her knuckles look as though they are in danger of breaking skin. Practically their whole tribe has come to see what the fuss is about.

It’s eerily quiet. Kurt begins to make his way forward and Santana follows him, subdued now that she seems to realise that maybe the ‘drama’ is more serious than she thought. He slips past the woman hunter, deftly avoiding her spike to get a better view while Santana trails after him.

And there, in the cusp of the half ring of his people, is the centre of the stress.

When Kurt sees them he reacts viscerally, his stomach heaving in upset while beside him Santana swears quietly. It’s not unexpected of course – he’d known that they were in the area and Santana had said herself that they were pissed off. But seeing the Cecaelia in person is a physical shock to Kurt and he feels ill suddenly, in a way he hasn’t done since the last time he saw a Cecaelia.

There are three of them; an old sea witch with long white hair and two old men with very impressive facial hair, if not so much on the top of their heads. They are sagging and bent, looking uncomfortably shapeless as though their chests have sunken into their tentacles, which spread in a flat circle across the ocean floor, kneading at the loose pieces of debris and sand unconsciously. They don’t have hands – instead they have two more tentacles extending from their familiarly human shoulder girdle, lined underneath with two rows of puckered suction cups, just like the rest of their tentacles. Kurt feels his skin itch just looking at them, at the sprawl of their bodies taking up so much space and the way those creepy tentacles seem to move completely free of conscious thought, as though they are their own beasts connected in some kind of Frankenstein monstrosity to a larger living body.

The Cecaelia are obviously unhappy. They’re intimidated too, shrinking close together as they stare up at all the people, but they’re clearly in the middle of an argument and apparently unwilling to give in.

The old man with the absurdly large beard draws in a deep, steeling breath and says in a wavering voice, ‘I shall say this once more, ma’am – we do not welcome your presence on our reef’s doorstep, and we wish you to leave this place as soon as possible!’

His cronies nod very seriously in agreement.

Kurt immediately recognises the voice that replies as Sue Sylvester, and he isn’t even surprised that although she is not the head of their tribe, she has somehow managed to situate herself as the position of power that the Cecaelia are to complain to.

Sylvester says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m having trouble hearing you over your obnoxious beard. Seriously, have you seen yourself? You look like Merlin. And your eyebrows look like sea cucumbers stuck to your face.’

The Cecaelian’s admittedly bushy eyebrows lower. He says, ‘We do not wish to negotiate with you. We will make this clear one time only – we consider your people vile and repugnant and a danger to our peace loving people. Galeos are not welcome in our reefs, Miss Sylvester. You have tonight to leave and we expect to see no sign of you in the morning.’

‘Or what? You’ll squirt us with your ink sacs?’ Sylvester says, goading. And then her jovial tone switches cold so fast that Kurt finds himself blinking and shaking his head to keep up. ‘We don’t take insult lightly, buddy,’ she says. ‘Tread carefully and we might just choose not to destroy your entire reefdom for kicks and giggles. But dare call us vile one more time and you can be sure that the only thing that remains of your community are the disturbingly large hairs in your nose, because god knows even us monsters can’t get rid of those. Got it?’

The Cecaelian doesn’t seem to know what to say, and nor do his companions. He looks up at the silent ranks of Galeos staring down at him impassively, and swallows hard. Eventually he bows his head and says, ‘Very well, Miss Sylvester. We shall revisit this conflict at a later date.’

Sylvester snorts. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘That’s likely.’

The Galeos disperse soon after, talking quietly among themselves. Kurt returns to his cave and goes to sleep with thoughts of Cecaelia sliding their tentacles through all of his dreams.

\--

When Blaine announces to his friends that he’s going out to explore a couple of days later, they’re understandably against the idea.

‘ _What?’_ Tina screeches, snapping her head towards Blaine dramatically so that her dark hair flares in a fan in the water around her head. ‘Are you _insane,_ Blaine?’

‘No!’ Blaine says defensively. ‘I just don’t see what the big deal is about.’

Mike and Artie exchange a worried look. Tina splutters in disbelief, throwing her hands up angrily.

Mike says placating, ‘I think what Tina is trying to say, Blaine, is that it’s really dangerous to leave the reef right now. It’s not a good idea.’

‘Yeah, dude,’ Artie agrees. ‘Those bloodsuckers find you, you’re dead before you have the chance to scream.’

Blaine knows that it’s probably not a good idea. Ever since the Elders had come back from their trip to the Galeos, completely unsuccessful in chucking them out of the caves, the entire reef has been on lockdown. No one is entering or leaving, too scared to leave their homes in case they get snapped up by one of the shark people. And Blaine knows that if he came across the Galeos, it couldn’t possibly end well. He wouldn’t even make it back to the reef, honestly. But – he just feels suffocated, forever surrounded by his friends and family with their tendency to pry into business where they don’t belong. Blaine likes people, he _loves_ people. He loves being around them as much as possible, but it hadn’t been until the reef had basically been quarantined that he realised exactly how much he valued those moments alone, time to explore and relax. Being around everyone so often makes him feels compressed, deflated, exhausted. So, he decides with rash determination, he’s going to explore. And then he will come back and he will feel happy and open to all of his friends once more, and everything will be right again.

He leaves his friends at the end of the reef where they trail after him while he prepares to leave. They pester him with nagging comments about how bad this idea is the whole way there, but when he heads off into open water they stop at the reef’s drop off as suddenly as though blocked by a solid wall. They call after him, but they’re unwilling to follow, as though taking even one step beyond the rocky shelf onto sand will put them vulnerable to the roaming Galeos. Blaine leaves them behind without a second thought.

The open water is cool and refreshing around him in a way that the crowded reef cannot be, running in little currents and streams along the ocean floor as he makes his way towards the surface. He feels more relaxed than he has been in weeks, happy and light all by himself.

In fact, the nerves only begin to flutter uncertainly in his chest when he reaches the very same rock pools he’d visited a week before – only instead of finding a whole ecosystem of teeming life, the whole plateau is completely deserted.

It’s not something Blaine is used to. When he visits these pools, even on bad days there are at least the miniature starfish that cling to the deepest pools close to the ocean. On a good day, the tide drops dozens of fish into every pool and he can find crabs that hide furtively under the rock overhangs; a couple of times Blaine had even stumbled across straight up octopi, so unnervingly similar and yet different from Cecaelia with their overgrown heads and bulbous eyes. Cute, but unnerving. But now... the only things that remain are the masses of barnacles anchored immutably to the rock.

Blaine makes his way slowly over the rocks, using his tentacles to pull and lever himself over the ridges and jutting edges of stone. He diligently checks every pool for signs of life and he finds that his first assessment was wrong, because those same fish and crabs really are in the water after all, but hidden, lining every crevice and niche, absolutely still. Blaine remembers the way so many of these animals have an innate self-preservation instinct to protect themselves, and he starts to get a tight, anxious feeling in his chest.

Even the rocks themselves seem oppressively still. It’s as though they’re holding their breath, halting the natural rhythm of the earth in its path. There are no waves today, the ocean lying oppressively flat, but it’s windy, coils and gusts of cold twisting through the air in a way that Blaine doesn’t think he will ever quite get used to. The wind is loud, moaning as it races its way through the valleys of rock, pulling at his hair like a devilish child as it rushes past. And then he hears it.

Just a hint of a voice, down over by the drop of the rocks into the ocean, masked and yet carried by the wind; audible for an instant before it’s snatched away again.

Blaine tilts his head, listens harder for that voice. It’s... cursing? He’s surprised to find that he understands the language – those in the ocean with the capacity for complex speech are rare and scattered and Blaine has never met somebody outside of his community who speaks the same language as him. But everyone in his community is currently scared shitless by the Galeos threat, so there’s just no way that one of them could possibly have made their way all the way up here. They wouldn’t be willing to do that on a _normal_ day, let alone now.

If Blaine was smarter, he’d leave well enough alone and head back down to the reef, away from the spookily quiet rock pools. But just like any other Cecaelia, Blaine has an instinctual sense of curiosity, an itching want to _know_ and _learn_ and file away his knowledge, and even as his fright grows, god has his curiosity been piqued.

He begins the arduous task of making his way over the solid land to the drop off of the ocean and as he gets closer the sound gets louder until the wind cannot steal it from him any longer. Whatever it is definitely isn’t happy, spitting out curses while he edges ever closer and hopes that he won’t find himself attacked as he goes. When he eventually makes it close enough that his tentacles wraps around the lip of rock, his heart is beating in a steady thrum against his rib cage, equal parts excitement and fear. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and pulls himself forward to look over the edge of the rock.

A long grey body, two strong arms, a startlingly human face –

Blaine jerks backward violently and camouflages without even thinking about it. His body fades into the dull brown of the rocks beneath and he stills so entirely that he can feel his muscles taut and quivering all through his body. His heart is thudding uncomfortably, the adrenaline surging in a single moment of panic.

Oh, god. Oh god, oh god oh god, he was warned about this. They said not to go out, they said that they would find him, the –

Galeos. Oh, god. Blaine feels nauseous. In his mind, he thinks of all the terrible ways that the thing will kill him. It will play with him, he knows it. It will eat all of his tentacles one by one so that he can’t get away, or maybe it’ll starve him, or it might keep letting him ‘escape’ only to catch him again and again until he’s so beaten down that he doesn’t have the spirit of freedom anymore, and only then will it kill him. Fuck, Blaine is a dead man. And they _told_ him that he shouldn’t be going exploring right now, and Blaine didn’t listen to them. Blaine is a dead _idiot._

Only... the thing hasn’t done anything yet. He thinks wildly that maybe it hadn’t even spotted him before Blaine camouflaged, so he’s lucky twice in a row with his encounters with the Galeos, and he’ll get away from this one unscathed too. But that would really be too much to ask for, he supposes.

Below him, the creature has quieted down quite suddenly. Blaine closes his eyes tight.

Then a dry voice. It says, ‘I hope you realise that your tentacles are really very visible right now, you know.’

And God, Blaine is so very, very fucked.

The voice is quiet for a moment, and then it says, ‘You’re not deaf, are you? Hello?’

It’s trying to speak to him. The Galeos, this innately cruel and vicious beast, is actually trying to make contact with him. My god, maybe it really is going to play games with Blaine before it kills him.

Underneath him, the Galeos sighs impatiently.

Blaine weighs up his options. On the one hand, the Galeos knows that he’s there and probably won’t be best pleased if Blaine just doesn’t acknowledge his existence. That could end pretty messily for Blaine. On the other hand, Blaine is a fair few metres up from the water’s break right now and he could theoretically make his way back across the rock pools to the other side where the rock flows smoothly into the sea, as opposed to this sheer drop. He could wait it out there, or he could try and make a get-away back to the reef before the Galeos knew where he’d gone.

But the Galeos are notorious for their agile twists and intimidating speeds. Blaine probably wouldn’t make it halfway before he got caught up and then systematically ripped into tiny little pieces.

For God’s sake.

Blaine takes a deep breath to try and calm himself in preparation for what is to come. His heart is still beating so fast, quick and thrumming like the wings of the sea birds he sees off shore diving for fish, and his tentacles are uncharacteristically still against the edges of the rock while he tries to psyche himself up for the plunge. Breathe in, breathe out. Keep the pattern. And...

Here goes.

Blaine pushes his head tentatively over the edge of the rock once more, letting himself fade back into his natural orange shade of skin once more. And there, below him and looking directly up at him with expectant eyes, is the Galeos.

Blaine’s first thought is that he doesn’t look quite as intimidating as he would have thought. He’s long and muscled, certainly, with a strong and lithe body, but his face is young and not scary in the slightest. He looks paler than normal, grey like clouds just hinting at rain, and his human chest and arms are paler still as though his body has been bleached of colour. But he has brown hair pushed up and away from his forehead, from a – a very attractive face, Blaine has to admit. He has sharp cheekbones and a pointed nose, a high forehead and wide mouth. He looks... surprisingly human.

Blaine never believed that he would ever be so close to a Galeos in his life. Now he can take in so many more details that he hadn’t noticed the last time he’d been in their presence – the gills opening like mouths on the Galeos’ ribs, the sharply pointed dorsal fin on his back, the little imperfect notches running down the sharp edge of the tail. He almost forgets to be terrified for a moment, too caught up in his fascination to remember his current position, until the Galeos clears his throat pointedly to get Blaine’s attention.

Blaine’s eyes snap back to the Galeos’ face. He meets his eyes, which are solidly blacked out.

The Galeos arches one eyebrow questioningly. He says, ‘Done with your little eye feast there?’

Blaine flushes. He stutters, ‘I – well – I just – ‘

The Galeos rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, relax. I’m not exactly in the position to eat you right now, even if I did want to.’

Blaine looks again, and suddenly he feels awful, because he somehow managed to miss the most obvious part of the Galeos in his overview of the creature. Because although he looks generally okay, the Galeos is trapped. He’s halfway in the water and halfway pulled onto the shelf of rock down below, and in the centre of the lower of half of his body – a fish hook hangs.

It’s huge, a spike instead of simply an average barb, obviously designed to trawl for all the larger fish in the sea like barracuda and pikes.  It’s practically a harpoon, like the ones Blaine occasionally finds abandoned on the ocean floor, buried and rusting under the sand, the ones Blaine knows the humans sometimes use to capture wild sharks and whales for their own purposes. It’s dug in deep in a way that has to be incredibly painful; the spike is almost invisible in his flesh, but the skin is red and angry in the surrounding area, and from the hook a thick chain trails down into the ocean where it pulls taut, trapped. The line tugs in the sway of the gentle waves, pulling at the spike where it’s stuck in the Galeos’ flesh and as he watches, he winces at one particularly strong yank.

Blaine suddenly feels terribly guilty, and then relieved that this Galeos was never actually a threat to him at all, and then even more horribly guilty for ever taking pleasure from another person’s pain.

He says hurriedly, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t notice, I – is there anything I can do?’

Oh my god, Blaine you idiot, did you just offer to _help_ the great giant predator who will eat you the first chance he gets?

The Galeos tilts his head ironically. He says, ‘Are you sure you want to help the great giant predator who will eat you the first chance he gets?’

Blaine blinks.

He’d always heard that Galeos were quite stupid. Ruled by their bodies and not by their brains and so forth. He knows that being Cecaelian has probably skewed his perspective, given that everyone in the ocean is stupid in comparison to him, but out of all the intelligent species known – Merpeople, Cecaelia, Selkie, Naga, whatever – the Galeos are thought to be the most dull, with a tiny brain to body ratio. Blaine’s heard so many stories about the ruthlessness of the Galeos and their brute strength, but he’d also always heard that if there was one way to escape from an impending attack, it’s to outwit them. He’d once heard that if a Cecaelian camouflages in front of a Galeos, they’ll believe that the Cecaelian had popped out of existence.

Obviously not true, he thinks wryly, remembering how unimpressed the Galeos had sounded when he’d told Blaine he could still see him.

Whatever the stereotype, this Galeos seems more astute than he would have expected, watching Blaine with intelligent, alert eyes while he waits for an answer.

Blaine manages to stutter out, ‘What’s your name?’

The Galeos says, ‘Kurt. What’s yours?’

‘I’m Blaine,’ he breathes. ‘It’s, um. It’s nice to meet you.’

Kurt’s eyebrow raises. ‘Is it?’

Blaine wonders if Kurt is reconsidering his promise not to eat Blaine.

The wound in Kurt’s side is beginning to bleed a bit more now – the skin around the spike is tearing from all the wrenches of the rope and as Blaine watches, a particularly large wave rushes up over the wound, making Kurt hiss as the salt water dashes against the gouge. When the wave draws back again, the water is tinted dark pink. Blaine can’t look away.

Kurt says, and he sounds strained and testy, ‘As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not in much of a position to help myself right now. I may need your assistance.’

‘Why can’t you get away?’ Blaine finds himself asking.

‘The line is trapped between two large rocks,’ Kurt replies. ‘And the hook is barbed. The humans design them specifically so that once something has been speared, the spike won’t exit the body again without causing even more damage.’ His lip curls as his says it.

‘Oh,’ Blaine says dumbly. He knows this, of course, had figured it out for himself while he examined the barbs he’d found on the ocean floor, but he’d never thought he’d ever see the theory in practice. It’s quite sickening, honestly. ‘Um, how did it happen?’

Kurt rolls his eyes. ‘Some human left it here in the ocean and idiot me didn’t notice it when I got too close to the rocks. A particularly savage wave comes in and suddenly I find myself trapped like a common fish with a damn hook in my side.’

Blaine feels sympathy suddenly, for this great creature brought low by a standard fishing mechanism that so many humans use. It must be humiliating to be trapped by the same thing that would snare a common trout. Even so, for just a moment he’s tempted to leave Kurt on his own – for all he knows, this whole thing could be an elaborate plot to get Blaine vulnerable so that Kurt can have a tasty snack for lunch. But...

Kurt rolls his eyes. ‘Look, Cecaelia, I’m sure you’ve heard all the rumours floating around about the big bad shark people, but I promise I’m not interested in hurting you. Octopus taste gross. All stringy.’

Although Blaine knows he’s probably being an idiot, his empathy is coming out to play in full force right now and looking at the trapped person in front of him, he’s struggling to really relate him to all the stories he’s been told in the past. Kurt is obviously hurting, though he tries to hide it, and Blaine thinks it would be supremely stupid to deliberately harm yourself in order to try and ensure a meal. He’s being genuine, he thinks, and he genuinely needs help right now.

Blaine takes the plunge. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘What can I do to help?’

Kurt’s face immediately relaxes at Blaine’s offer, the strained lines in his forehead smoothing out, the tightness of his jaw loosening just a little bit. ‘I need you to free the line from the rock,’ he says with a hand flicked towards the fishing rope. ‘I can’t reach in there myself without aggravating the sore.’

Blaine begins to make his careful way down the steep rock towards Kurt. Kurt says, ‘I can get my friends to remove the spike once you get me out of here. I think you might throw up if I make you do it.’

‘You have friends?’ Blaine blurts without thinking. Although he knows that Galeos travel in groups, it seems highly improbable to him that barbaric creatures like these could ever form a friendship.

Kurt stares at him. ‘You obviously don’t have a biased opinion of my species,’ he says. Blaine flushes dark orange.

He slips into the water beside the shelf where Kurt waits, and he’s so close now that Blaine’s skin is prickling. If Kurt wanted to, all he would have to do is reach out with his very human hands to snap Blaine’s neck. He hopes to God that he hasn’t misread the entire situation.

To his relief, all Kurt does is watch him steadily while he prepares to dive underwater.

Blaine slips down – and finds himself face to face with two more Galeos.

He jerks backward in sheer surprise, but his head smacks against the hard rock right behind him, sending lances of pain through his skull and turning his vision dizzy and unfocused. Then he begins to panic, because oh god he was _right,_ this whole thing was a ploy and now he’s dead, he is _so dead,_ and now there are _three_ of them, oh god, what the hell is he supposed to do –

Only they’re gesturing at him now, speaking words that he can’t comprehend in his distress, until finally the one with the single strip of hair down his head rolls his eyes skyward and grabs him with a strong hand, hauls him upward out of the water again, right onto the shelf beside Kurt.

Through water clogged ears, Blaine hears Kurt snap, ‘I signalled for help an _hour_ ago, what the hell took you so long? And what happened to _him?’_

 ‘Jeez, sorry for not being available at your every whim, your highness,’ a female voice says, haughty and affronted. ‘Ursula here flipped out when he saw us, smacked his slimy head on the rock.’

Blaine’s head gives another unpleasant spike of pain. He blinks away the stars in front of his eyes and pulls himself upright because he seriously does not want to be caught off guard in front of _three_ Galeos.

The two other Galeos are paddling upright in the water, using their arms to keep themselves upright, staring up at Kurt, who has wrenched himself into a sitting position at their arrival.

‘Dude, are you okay?’ one of them asks, the male one with the weird hair and the strong arms. He’s staring at Kurt’s side with wide eyes and reaches out a hand as though to touch it before Kurt jerks away harshly. ‘That shit is ghetto.’

‘I’m fine,’ Kurt sniffs. ‘Just... stuck is all.’

‘You sure are,’ the other Galeos snorts. This one is a female, beautiful with long dark hair that floats on top of the water like lily pads. She nods her head at Blaine, and when she looks at him and smiles, she reveals three rows of intimidatingly sharp teeth. Blaine is sure that she means the action to be exactly as threatening as it comes across. He’s suddenly aware of exactly how harmless Kurt seems in comparison. She asks, ‘So what exactly is the crustacean doing here anyway, princess?’

Blaine thinks of telling her that he’s a cephalopod, not a crustacean, but he’s really not stupid enough for that.

‘He was helping me,’ Kurt says. He looks at Blaine and his eyes are surprisingly sympathetic, as though he understands exactly how Blaine feels right now. ‘Blaine, this is Santana and Puck, my friends.’

‘Great,’ Puck says. ‘Okay, now that we’re all acquainted, can we kick him out of our ménage-a-trois so we can get you home and get that thing out of your side?’

‘Don’t be rude,’ Kurt says sharply. ‘ _He_ was actually willing to help, which is more than you have done.’

‘I’ll go,’ Blaine says quickly, all too eager to get out of this situation. ‘I, um, should probably be getting home anyway.’

‘You live down in the reef?’ Santana says suddenly.

Blaine freezes and wonders what the correct answer is in this situation. Eventually, he settles on, ‘Yes?’

‘You’re the assholes who tried to kick us out of the caves!’ Santana cries and turns to Kurt accusingly. ‘Kurt, you let this _dick_ try to help you?’

Puck nods emphatically beside her.

Blaine winces. He says quietly, ‘To be fair, it wasn’t _me_ who did that...’

Kurt shakes his head at Blaine in exasperation and Blaine is surprised at the feeling of connection he suddenly feels to Kurt, as though they are the only two who understand how insane his friends are. ‘Just go, Blaine,’ Kurt says. ‘My friends can help me out now. But, uh – thank you. Thank you for being willing to help, I guess.’

‘Sure,’ Blaine says. ‘Um, anytime, I guess.’ He looks warily at Puck and Santana. Puck briefly acknowledges him before reaching to lift Kurt easily under his arms, but Santana refuses to even look at him, letting her dark hair hang like a curtain of wet weed between them. He says uncertainly, ‘I’ll see you around?’

Kurt’s smile twists. ‘Probably not.’

So Blaine returns to his reef, and his friends are alarmed at the state of his skull, and he doesn’t tell a soul about his encounter with the Galeos. And privately in his mind, he suddenly has no idea what think about this strange species of shark and human. Because meeting Kurt... meeting Kurt has changed everything.

\--

As it turns out, Kurt and Blaine do in fact continue to see each other around.

Not often, of course. When Santana and Puck manage to finally wedge the damn fishing line out from between the two rocks after almost an hour of cursing and violent tugging, Kurt is so tired that he can hardly swim. His side is inflamed and burning and when he slips back into the water, he finds himself falling to the ocean floor alarmingly fast, before his friends catch him under the arms and hold him between them as they make their way back to their temporary homes.

He can’t go out for weeks after that. Santana is around always, even more irritating and biting than normal, which Kurt can only find touching because he knows that it means Santana misses his presence. Puck acts more or less the same, but Kurt quickly discovers that while his side is still too injured for any use, Puck is pretty much willing to do anything Kurt asks for to make him comfortable. He tries not to abuse that newfound power too much.

But Kurt isn’t a homebody, never has been, and although he enjoys the pampering while his wound itches its way through the tedious stages of healing, he finds himself tetchy and too full of energy to be a pleasant presence, and he snaps at people more than he cares to admit. Not that they aren’t completely capable of snapping back, because Galeos are hardly known for their tact, but it makes him feel guilty and he finds himself counting down the days until his swimming is up to shape enough that he can venture out of the caves once more.

On the first day that Kurt leaves the caves, he sees Blaine again.

It’s from a distance this time – he’s hunting, actually, in the little recess of water that always has plenty of fish swimming around for him to take his pick from. He’s just snatched up a big one and is holding it by its limp neck when he spots Blaine a couple hundred metres away, digging at the soft sand of the shallow ocean floor, evidently searching for something. He tilts his head as he watches the Cecaelia; he looks the same as he has last time, with long orange tentacles, faded yellow at the tips as though his skin had run out of pigment, and a cloud of fluffy dark hair around his head. As Kurt looks on, Blaine’s (irritatingly, infuriatingly, distractingly handsome) face creases into a frown and he digs deeper, harder.

Kurt wonders if he should say hello. After all, despite the fact that Blaine hadn’t actually done much except provide conversation for a few minutes, Kurt is honestly grateful that he would have been willing to help at all. He’s fully aware of how the rest of the marine life view Galeos, can hardly not be, and he knows that most people would have bolted the moment they realised exactly _what_ was stuck on the rocks. And, he reminds himself, Cecaelia and Galeos don’t get along for larger reasons; when he’d seen what his rescuer was he’d almost been tempted to pretend that he really _hadn’t_ seen him just to avoid the confrontation. But there had just been something different about Blaine.

You really shouldn’t be trying to make friends with Cecaelia, he reasons with himself. He can only imagine how disgusted Santana would be if she found out. Ever since those crotchety old grandparents had come to try to kick them out, Santana had been in an even worse mood than ever, seeming to take personal offense from their slight, and every chance she gets she uses to make snide comments about the Cecaelian people. The Galeos were not friends of Cecaelians; that would be completely improbable and utterly dim witted. But, the more impudent part of himself argues, Since when have you cared what other people think? Not even your family stops you from doing what you want. And Blaine had been so _nice_ to him, really. If not a little tentative.

Just as he comes to the decision to approach Blaine and say thank you, Blaine throws his hands up in a fit of frustration and then he’s gone again – Kurt doesn’t even blink, but he’s gone.

\--

The next time they come across one another, it’s Blaine who sees Kurt. In fact, Kurt doesn’t even notice him the whole time he’s there because he’s too busy trying to keep Santana and Puck from murdering him. But Blaine is there on the sandy floor, and watches with startled amusement as Kurt shoots past in the water, laughing hysterically and leaving a frothing path of bubbles behind him as he goes. Santana and Puck follow close behind, yelling explicatives and, interestingly enough, tied together firmly by both wrists with a long piece of frayed fisherman’s rope. Blaine has no idea how Kurt managed it, but neither Santana nor Puck seem altogether too happy about it.

It’s only when the trio are far in the distance, their shouts long faded, that Blaine realises that not once during the entire scene had he felt that familiar paralysing fear that he associated with Galeos for so many years. But it’s probably just these three, he thinks. These three very unusual Galeos who had chosen not to harm him when they’d had every opportunity almost a month before. Or maybe it’s because instead of the ruthless hunters that seemed so descriptive of their race, they’d just acted like kids mucking around in their free time instead. Just maybe, it had been that.

On his expeditions out into the ocean he comes across Galeos several times, though he never has to go face to face with them. And although the very idea of it may have once caused him to break into a cold sweat, ever since meeting Kurt and Puck and Santana, he doesn’t quite think the experience would be as scary anymore. He tries to remind himself that so far he’s only actually _met_ three Galeos and that’s hardly a proper sampling to determine the temperate of _anything,_ but he finds that even though his heart rate spikes every time he spots one of the predators in the distant, he never feels the urge to run, to flee. When he watches them – and he does watch them, because he could hardly resist when they’re just so _fascinating –_ they seem so utterly normal that Blaine doesn’t quite know how to react. They hunt with a single minded determination that makes Blaine feel just as trapped as their prey, but they clearly don’t _revel_ in the killing. There’s no ripping of limbs to be found. He doesn’t know, exactly, when the shift of his perception of Galeos took place – well, he does. Because after all – meeting Kurt changed everything.

\--

Kurt settles into his life in the caves and he stops thinking about Blaine. Time stretches as his tribe familiarises itself with its new surroundings and he receives the official title of hunter, to bring in food for the tribes people to eat at the end of every day. He doesn’t see any more Cecaelia, despite their threat of more major repercussions when they’d refused to clear out weeks ago. Part of him feels vindicated that apparently their reputation is enough to warn even creatures like Cecaelia from coming after them. The other part of him is just sad that they were even given that reputation in the first place.

The fourth time that Blaine and Kurt’s paths collide, they actually talk to one another. Kurt is out hunting, as usual; also as usual, Blaine is exploring. Kurt isn’t paying much attention to anything around him – he has his eye on a beautiful seal up near the surface, big and round and enough to keep him full for three days if he can catch her. She isn’t paying much attention herself, instead focused on the few scattered fish flitting around near the surface. Kurt begins circling slowly underneath her, eyes fixed upward while he watches her movements and plans his attack. Flip her out of the water, make her panic, snap her neck before she can escape. Quick, clean, simple. He prepares for the strike, his circles becoming smaller, shallower, while she paddles aimlessly in the water as the last of the fish disperse. And then –

‘Kurt?’

The seal startles at the sudden noise, looks around and spots Kurt. The next moment she’s gone, streaking off in the opposite direction. And Kurt is left with no meal at all.

He lets out a growl of frustration and swings around to find the source of his frustration. He’s swears to god, if Puck is stirring up trouble again –

But no. It’s that Cecaelia, Blaine, watching him with alarmed eyes and visibly shrinking backward at the sight of his bared teeth, his tentacles grappling nervously in the water when Kurt turns on him.

Kurt blinks in surprise, then pulls back quickly when he realises exactly how threatening his position is, still poised to attack though his mark has escaped. He shakes himself and his irritation leaks away when he sees how timid Blaine looks still, fading half out of sight as though he is fighting his camouflage reflex to stay visible.

‘I’m sorry,’ Blaine says. ‘I, um, I didn’t mean for you to lose your prey.’

‘No,’ Kurt says. ‘I shouldn’t have reacted like that, I guess.’

Blaine smiles a little, looking downwards bashfully. ‘I don’t mind.’

An awkward silence descends then while Kurt waits for Blaine to speak again, to announce the reason for his appearance maybe. He can’t think of any reason why he would want to approach Kurt again after the last time that they saw each other – Blaine had looked all too eager to get away and Kurt would have thought that he’d be spending the past few weeks attempting to – he doesn’t know what. Bleach his mind of the nightmarish creatures he’d been forced to interact with? He doesn’t know. Certainly not approaching them again, that’s for sure.

Eventually, Blaine waves a tentacle and says without meeting Kurt’s eyes, ‘So. Your wound closed up pretty well, I guess.’

‘Yeah,’ Kurt replies with a nod. ‘Back to work and all that.’ He bobs his head self consciously.

Blaine asks, ‘So you work as a...?’

‘Hunter,’ Kurt says. ‘I and ten other people spend our days trying to gather enough food for my tribe.’

Blaine frowns. ‘Is that hard work? I mean, I’m guessing you guys eat a lot.’

‘We don’t eat as much as our shark relatives,’ Kurt explains. ‘We’re smaller, we have less muscle mass to provide energy for. We eat maybe as much as you do. And there’s not so many of us in the tribe.’

Blaine looks fascinated all of a sudden, tilting his head as though it will somehow help him retain the information better. ‘That’s so interesting,’ he murmurs. ‘I – back in my community, we don’t know much about Galeos except for, you know, hearsay.’

Kurt’s mouth twitches into a dry smile. ‘I’m sure everything you’ve heard is very accurate.’

He imagines that Blaine has heard many stories in his childhood about the so called brutal nature of shark human hybrids. He wonders if Blaine also knows about the kind of treatment that his tribe is subjected to everywhere they go because of those insidious rumours. Their reception here in the caves is hardly an isolated incident; it had been the same the last place they had settled down, where the Naga had lived (and like _they_ had been ones to complain, Kurt had thought uncharitably at the time, when their own species was infamous for eating their own snake ancestors in the winter months); and also before that with the normally so cheerful Selkie, nervously grabbing at their furred tails while they informed the tribe leader that there was simply no place for them there. Nobody wants the Galeos around. It is both lucky and unfortunate that they are a nomadic species, because no community has to deal with their presence for long – but then, that means that no community is ever able to understand their true nature either. Kurt often finds himself wondering what would happen if they ever stayed in one place long enough to gain a true connection with another humanoid species. As if that would be enough to start changing peoples’ minds about them.

Blaine flushes at Kurt’s words and looks downward again. ‘Well, I would have said so a few weeks ago probably. But – ‘ and he looks up at Kurt to catch his eye – ‘I’m starting to think I may have been a little bit... unfair, in my presumptions.’

Kurt smiles, and feels the bitter edge of it himself. ‘Yes, well, it’s not as if I haven’t heard my own fair share of Cecaelian ghost tales in my life time.’

Blaine looks up again, apparently too intrigued to remember his intimidation. ‘Really? Like?’

Kurt shrugs and says airily, ‘Oh, you know, when I was little I used to hear about Cecaelians who were part elf, part kraken. I was told that Cecaelia were twenty metres tall and their tentacles extended one hundred metres in all directions.’ He smirks at Blaine, who is staring at him with wide eyes, utterly enthralled by what he is hearing. ‘You should have seen how disappointed I was when I actually saw Cecaelia with my own eyes for the very first time. I threw a huge tantrum, believe me.’ He sighs. ‘I was taught that you were the terrors of the sea, tearing human ships to the ocean floor as an idle sport.’

‘I was taught that if I ever met a Galeos, I wouldn’t live to tell the tale,’ Blaine admits, and a tentacle comes up to rub embarrassed at the back of his neck. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

Kurt tilts his head. ‘And you don’t still think that?’ he asks.

Blaine looks at him for a long moment and Kurt finds himself almost trapped by his magnetic eyes. They’re almost the same colour as his skin, large and golden brown like the smooth rocks of a cave wall. When Kurt had first met Blaine, he’d had to hide how enraptured he was by the way the sunlight lit his eyes like gems. Even away from the sun, they’re gorgeous.

Blaine says quietly, ‘It must be hard to have the whole ocean turned against you.’

‘I’ve never really known any different,’ Kurt replies, equally soft. ‘People... it’s hard to get a second chance when most people don’t give you any chances to begin with.’

Blaine nods slowly, contemplative, pulling his two lips in between each other. ‘I think I’d like to,’ he says finally. ‘Give you a chance, I mean. Clearly, I’m wrong about quite a few things and I want to find out the truth for myself.’ He grins at little impishly at Kurt’s amazed eyebrows, his surprised eyes. ‘Think of it like a research project if you want.’

Kurt can’t help but smile then, and he wonders how their situation even progressed to this point in the first place. Part of him, the part that sounds like Santana, is warning that this could turn out horribly, because since when do Galeos and Cecaelia align themselves with one another? But most of him just truly does not give a shit. So he hold out a hand and when he realises that Blaine doesn’t understand what they gesture means, reaches out for one of Blaine’s tentacles himself, grasping the (surprisingly slime-less) appendage in his hand and giving it a firm shake. ‘It’s a deal,’ he says.

\--  

Being friends with Kurt is kind of amazing, if Blaine is being honest with himself. Living all his life in his little secluded community in the reef, most of Blaine’s interactions have been with other Cecaelia and sometimes he feels like his own species is almost uncanny in how similar they all are to one another – and there’s only so much intellectual stimulation he can take before his brain becomes oversaturated. Of course, the other locals in the reef know him well, like the pack of seals that live in the cove around the corner, or the dolphins that occasionally visit to play. Blaine appreciates their presence as much as anyone, but as smart as they are, none of them have ever been able to communicate with him effectively beyond nudging him the ribs to direct him where to go.

In contrast, Kurt is smart and witty and sharp edged and completely able to keep up with Blaine in ways that none of the non-hybrids ever could have. Although Blaine quickly learns that Kurt’s education isn’t anywhere near as advanced as Blaine’s, he’s curious and willing to learn, and he soaks up facts easily and with all the vivacious drive for knowledge that Blaine had had when he was younger. When he comments on it off handedly one day, Kurt shrugs and picks at his one of his own side fins before saying, ‘Galeos are less centred around learning, more about surviving. We’re not stupid, but I think they think that if the knowledge doesn’t mean expanding our own endurance, we don’t have any use for it.’ And when Blaine points out how eager Kurt had been to learn about all the new things Blaine could show him, all he says is, ‘Well I guess I’ve always been different.’

In return for all the new things Blaine can show Kurt, he finds himself learning so much more about Galeos than he would have ever thought possible. He wasn’t wrong about their predatory instincts – Kurt had offered to show him how he hunts one day, but his mind had flashed immediately to the day when he’d approached Kurt. He remembers the way Kurt had been cornering the poor unknowing seal, the precise and sharp movements of his body as he closed in on it, as quiet as only a consummate predator can be. He can imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t interrupted when he had, and the thought makes him feel vaguely nauseas. Cecaelia mostly stick to their fish – somehow, eating something as big and sentient as a seal feels wrong, although he can’t make sense of that no matter how he looks at it. So he passes on the proffered hunting tutorial, and they move on.

Kurt, for his part, is completely willing answer all the questions Blaine asks, day after day. He’s infinitely more patient than Blaine would have ever thought and once again, Blaine feels guilty for all those insane preconceptions he’d had of the Galeos just a couple of months ago. He asks Kurt what it’s like to move all the time, and Kurt tells him that he’s never known anything any different. He’d been born halfway across the ocean and since then his whole tribe has been on the move, just as all Galeos have been for centuries. He’s never been back to his birthplace, says that he wouldn’t know where it was even if he wanted to. Blaine asks him if the nomadic life is ever lonely and Kurt gets quiet and distant for a moment. He says softly, ‘Sometimes it gets exhausting. I only really have two friends, you know? I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I knew anyone outside my tribe, but nobody really wants to get to know a Galeos.’ He flashes a quick smile over at Blaine. ‘Except for you, of course.’

They don’t talk about the animosity between their people. When he’s at home, he has to deal with the constant comments about how dangerous those Galeos over in the caves are, how they’re clearly planning an intricate attack, and any day now they’re going to close in and rip apart the entire reef. He bites his lip at that, thinks of Kurt’s friendship and even the way Kurt’s friends had seemed utterly uninterested in Blaine when they’d met him, and he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say how wrong he thinks his community is about the Galeos, because they all think that he feels the same way as they do, and right now he just doesn’t have the courage to speak up in defence of the tribe. He wants to tell him that he doesn’t think Galeos are half as dangerous as people say they are, but he can’t because then they’d ask him how he knows that, they’d probably ask him to cite and source his references, and he’d have to tell them all about his burgeoning friendship with Kurt, and they wouldn’t like that at all.

So when he goes ‘exploring’ he deals with his friends’ disapproving looks and he hopes they don’t notice that he’s been away from home more than ever in the past few weeks; he doesn’t even want to imagine the uproar if anyone found out that he was spending time with a Galeos of all things. But hanging out with Kurt is thrilling and refreshing and _new_ and Blaine finds himself wanting to spend every spare moment with him. So he deals with Tina’s pointed jabs and ignores Mike’s concerned glances and every chance he gets, he goes to see Kurt.

And Kurt is so different from everything that he’d ever heard about the great sharks that he has trouble connecting him to his fellow Galeos at all. Because where so many Galeos are brash and loud and don’t think about anything before they do it (and after meeting Santana and Puck, Blaine feels that this at least has some truth to it), Kurt is the opposite. He’s quiet and gentle in a way that completely catches Blaine off guard, especially considering his job. But Kurt doesn’t particularly seem to _enjoy_ hunting, approaches it with pragmatism and detachment, and he shows a startling level of astuteness when he picks up on Blaine’s discomfort with the whole concept, assuring Blaine that he always makes it as quick and painless as possible.

But as many moments as there are that Blaine finds himself forgetting the differences between his and Kurt’s species, there are just as many that constantly shock into the realisation that Kurt truly is Galeos at heart. Cecaelia are the scholars of the sea, academics of sorts, and they act it. As much as Kurt seems to love learning, he has absolutely no interest in abstract knowledge. He doesn’t seem to understand the use of tracking the tide’s patterns, for instance. Back home, the Cecaelia sit in their reef and they talk about all the things they know and occasionally they make expeditions to areas around the reef to gather information, but Kurt has a ceaseless energy within him that results in destruction if he doesn’t expend it in a constructive way. He loves to be out and about when the Cecaelia would rather be safe at home; he finds the water’s surface exhilarating when the Cecaelia think it terrifying; he loves to play and laugh where so many Cecaelia take themselves more seriously than anything.

And then there are those _other_ times that remind Blaine that he is Galeos, like when he smiles at Blaine and Blaine finds himself frozen with fear at the sight of those serrated blades in his mouth, weapons designed specifically for killing, and he has to remind himself fervently that Kurt doesn’t mean harm because Kurt is his _friend;_ he is not Kurt’s prey. There are times when he forgets his own strength and when he playfully slaps his tail across one of Blaine’s tentacles, not ten minutes later a painful welt had risen across his skin. Though the incident had been intimidating in Kurt’s strength, Kurt had been so adorably repentant when he realised what had happened that Blaine had been immediately reassured that Kurt is not as the stories say.

Kurt becomes Blaine’s partner whenever he goes exploring. It’s so different to have someone else along with him when for so many years his expeditions had been solitary and he finds himself revelling in it, revelling in the company and the companionship it brings. Kurt is curious and eager to help, but though he can breathe air just like Blaine, he can’t move on land because of the shape of his tail. As a compromise, Blaine says goodbye to his rock pools for a while and the two of them beginning exploring the caves near Kurt’s home.

That’s how they come across what eventually becomes _their_ cave.

Kurt and Blaine are making their way around the edge of the ocean, the sharp drop where the cliff falls into the sea, and the two of them had been engaging in playful debate, more focused on each other than on their surroundings.

‘Look, my grandma says that the humans use rock to generate energy,’ Blaine is arguing. ‘Isn’t that _ingenious_? Imagine what Cecaelia could create if we could do that, it would be incredible – ‘

‘Okay, but humans also dump their rubbish into the sea wherever possible,’ Kurt rebuts. ‘I know you think they’re fascinating, but they’re not _gods_ – ‘

Blaine laughs and Kurt continues, ‘Besides, there’s a drawing of humans on the side of my cave wall, a mage merperson probably did it, and they just look weird. Their legs are creepy.’

Blaine shrugs. ‘I still maintain that it would be interesting to know how they live for just a little while. Down here they might as well be aliens, but they’re not so far away after all, not really.’

Kurt hums a little in agreement, and then his attention is drawn away again. ‘Hey – look. Is that a cave?’

It’s just a small hole from the outside, leading in to a tunnel inside that’s only just big enough to fit the two of them in single file. Blaine can mould himself up and around the wall at ease with his flexible limbs, but Kurt can just barely fit through with his more rigid frame, squeezing in behind Blaine with grunts and a curse or two.

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long before the tunnel opens out into a small but deep pool, and when Kurt and Blaine break the surface, shaking the water back from their eyes, they find themselves in a cavern, lit from above by faint light from a hole in the very top of the dome of rocks. It’s large and airy, so comfortably secluded and quiet – besides the moss growing high up on the damp walls, there’s no life there at all. Just Kurt and Blaine and their voices echoing eerily back at them from the walls, like a dozen ghosts whispering in on their conversation.

They don’t say much while they’re in there. Somehow the moment feels special, together in this isolated little cave with no one there to find them.

They begin to frequent the cave more when Santana and Puck start trying to tag along with them on their outings like some messed up guard of honour. Santana doesn’t like Blaine at all and makes no secret of it and although Puck is nice enough, he manages to make about a dozen clueless offensive remarks about Cecaelia in the first hour of his presence. Once again surprisingly in tune with Blaine’s emotions, Kurt starts taking Blaine to the cave more and more often in order to get away from them. He says with a sweetly innocent smile that although Santana and Puck are relentless in their badgering, it’s worth putting up with it to get some time along to hang out with Blaine. ‘I like being with you,’ he says without adornment. ‘Not so much when they’re being irritating.’

Of course, it’s not always great. Because although Blaine’s relationship with Kurt has done wonders at knocking down his preconceptions of what Galeos are like, he’s spent the last eighteen years listening to tales of terrifying shark hybrids and wondering what would happen if he ever came across one himself, and no one person could ever erase that prejudice entirely. Not even Kurt, who has changed Blaine’s life in so many ways. Blaine finds himself making comments that he doesn’t think through, words that are harmless in his mind until they slip through his lips and Kurt looks at him with a strange expression, impassive and closed off, suddenly invulnerable. He always makes sure to backtrack, figure out what it was that he’d said that Kurt didn’t like, and every time he figures it out he files those words carefully in the back of his mind to make sure it never happens again.

Kurt, for his part, is not entirely free of his own bias. Although it doesn’t happen as often with him as it does with Blaine, Kurt grew up hearing his own stories about Cecaelia and as much as he likes to pretend it hasn’t, his brain has its own set of heuristics that skew his conception of Blaine, and sometimes he messes up too. Blaine still bristles at the thought that any of his kind could possibly be anything other than a quiet, peace loving species, as Kurt had once insinuated. Cecaelia don’t even know _how_ to fight. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting experience to be subjected to stereotypes for the first time in his life, and he wonders if this is how Kurt feels _all_ the time.

As time passes, the slip ups slow from a river into a stilted trickle, and eventually they stop altogether. Kurt and Blaine learn about one another, and they grow.

\--

One day in the cave, sitting close beside each other on top of the rock with bottom halves relaxing in the pool of water, they talk about the Galeos and the Cecaelia.  
  
Blaine brings it up first. It's something that's been niggling at the back of his mind for a while now, piqued by the tiny throw away comments that Kurt would let slip out in the first few weeks of their friendship, that Kurt very clearly has a different idea of Cecaelian history to what Blaine knows. So he asks, 'Kurt? What... what were you taught about Cecaelia when you were young?'  
  
'Besides outlandish lies about great kraken-ish beasts?' Kurt jokes wryly and Blaine laughs.  
  
'Yes, other than that.'   
  
Kurt sighs and leans back on his hands, looks up at that weak shard of light from the hole in the top of the cave. He says, 'It was less what we were taught as kids and more... personal experience, I guess, that influenced my preconceptions of you.'  
  
Blaine looks at him.  
  
Kurt says slowly, 'Blaine, not every Cecaelian community is like yours. I've met several in my life, it’s just inevitable with all the travelling we do, and out of all of them, yours has probably been... the softest.'  
  
'The softest?' Blaine frowns.  
  
Kurt shrugs. 'You love learning things. It's part of your upbringing. But - not all of you are like that.'  
  
Blaine asks quietly, 'What do you mean?'

Kurt shrugs. ‘I don’t know. In my experience, there are two types of Cecaelia – ones like you and your community, who kind of just want to learn all the time, and the other kind.’

‘The other kind?’

‘The wild kind,’ Kurt explains. ‘More vicious.’ He rubs at his shoulder, staring down as the ripples created in the water. ‘We came across a pack of them years ago when I was little and they, um.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘They... shocked us in how they acted.’ He fiddles with the rocks underneath his hand and looks anywhere but Blaine. ‘Even though they were an intelligent species, they didn’t speak any language, they kind of just shouted gibberish at us. And, they um.’ He draws a lip between one row of sharp teeth. ‘They ate sharks. And when we tried to talk to them, they attacked us. They... they thought we were _food._ ’

Blaine’s eyes widen. ‘Wouldn’t we have heard about these Cecaelia before?’

Kurt shakes his head. ‘The ocean is a huge place, Blaine, and you are in contact with approximately all the same people you’ve known all your life. You think that Cecaelia are all like you because that’s all you know. Besides, everyone wants to think well of themselves. Why would you want to be known as predators?’

‘But you’re trying to tell me that my species are bloodthirsty Galeos killers?’ Blaine asks incredulously.

‘Sharks, Blaine, not Galeos,’ Kurt says sharply. ‘It’s like if I liked to snack on your octopus buddies. And some of them, yeah!’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Blaine says flatly.

Kurt’s eyes narrow dangerously. ‘I remember it happening, Blaine. If you want to live in denial, sure, go ahead, but don’t call me a liar.’

Blaine is silent for a long moment. He feels angry and nervy at the accusation, but he also knows that Kurt has no reason to make this up, no reason to make Blaine and his species look bad. But it hurts to be told about this, especially when he’d honestly heard nothing about it in eighteen years of life, and he feels surprisingly shamefaced about the whole thing.

Eventually, he says, ‘So that’s why Galeos don’t like Cecaelia?’

Kurt raises his shoulders a little. ‘I think it’s mostly just our tribe. And who knows, maybe it was just that one community of Cecaelia who did that, but it kind of made us nervy for all the _other_ Cecaelia we came across.’

‘And that’s why Santana hates me so much?’ Blaine asks.

‘And that’s why Santana hates you so much,’ Kurt confirms. ‘She’s convinced you’re going to eat me on one of these outings that we go on.’

‘Huh. My friends would be saying that about you if they knew about us,’ Blaine says.

Kurt smiles. ‘Well, they probably have more reason to.’

‘No,’ Blaine says speculatively. ‘No, I really don’t think they do. You’re not going to hurt me.’ He meets Kurt’s eyes.

Kurt slowly goes pink as he meets Blaine’s gaze. ‘Never,’ he says.

\--

 Sometimes Kurt wonders how Blaine became his best friend.

It hadn’t happened immediately. When the whole thing had first started out, Kurt had felt cautious every time he was around Blaine, feeling like he would be judged or Blaine wouldn’t like him, or maybe one day he’d just stop coming to their little meetings altogether without a hint of forewarning. But Blaine had kept coming, and every time Kurt had seen him he was always the same: bright, eager, and with an insatiable curiosity about the world around him. Sometimes Blaine mesmerises him with his wide smile and endearingly wide eyes, and Kurt finds himself staring at him for minutes on end without taking in a word he’s saying. He’s always embarrassed in those moments; no matter how pretty Blaine looks whenever he gets excited, it’s no excuse not to listen to what he’s saying. That’s _rude._

He finds himself thinking those sorts of things a lot these days, and it’s both scary and elating. Blaine is, of course, a very attractive person and Kurt is sure that back in his own community he has plenty of boys interested, but he’d never thought that he’d be spending his nights waiting to go to sleep and actually counting down the hours until he could see the boy again.

It honestly doesn’t even occur to him that he has a crush until Santana points it out one day. In her own very Santana-esque fashion, of course.

Kurt is just passing her by where she’s working on constructing a pike, wrapping strong sea weed around the base of the sharpened stone and yanking it tight aggressively. He’s eager to get out of the tribe’s congregation circle to meet Blaine at their usual spot in the cave, and as he brushes past her fin she mutters, ‘Going to see loverboy again, Lady?’

Kurt backsplashes quickly. ‘I beg your pardon?’

She straightens up, her attention away from her work now as she turns to him, arms folded tight over her chest. Around them, the other tribes people pay them no mind as they go about their business. Santana says, ‘You know you’re spending more time with Slimy than you are with us now?’

Kurt frowns. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It is,’ Santana snaps, ‘and I would know, because I can literally count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen you in the past week.’

Kurt opens his mouth to protest, but he doesn’t know what to say.

Santana folds her arms across her chest and continues, ‘I really hope you know how disgustingly obvious you are about being in love with Creeps McGee down in the reef. I can literally smell the pheromones _wafting_ off of you.’

‘His name is Blaine, Santana,’ Kurt says sharply, ‘and you’re talking shit.’

‘Whatever, Hummel,’ Santana says hard. Her jaw is tight and her fingers dig white imprints into her own arms as she stares at Kurt. ‘Just remember what we are. We’re nomads, and in a couple of months, we’re going to be just a memory to them, and you’ll never see your boy again. And remember what _he_ is too, and don’t act like I don’t have good reasons for not trusting him.’

She says quieter, ‘I’ve been with you all your life, Kurt, and I’ll be sticking with you long after you’ve forgotten all about your stupid little multi-legged fling. You shouldn’t misjudge something like that.’ And with that she spins, sending a column of bubbles racing to the surface, and before the water clears, she’s gone.

Kurt thinks about Santana’s words all the way to the cave and when he reaches it and Blaine hasn’t arrived yet, he thinks some more.

Now that he’s been faced with it, he knows that there’s truth to Santana’s accusation that he’s in love with Blaine. He’s not _in love,_ no, but has he got a crush? He can’t deny that. Honestly, he doesn’t understand why anyone _wouldn’t_ have a crush on Blaine, who is sweet and funny and smarter than Kurt can even begin to comprehend. But he also knows that if Santana was right about that, then she was right about everything else she said as well. Kurt’s people _are_ nomadic and in time they will move away from this reef, just like they’ve moved away from every other place they’ve ever lived. They’re not made to stay in one place forever; cursed with eternal wanderlust, they roam the oceans and they cover more ground than any other animal except for maybe the dolphins and the whales. And they never, ever retrace their footsteps. Cecaelia like to stay in one place, so how could he and Blaine ever work out?

But he can’t deny that he wants to try. He wants to see if they can make it work. If only for a little while, before they had to move away again, they could be something great. He can’t imagine that they would act much different from what they already do. They would kiss more, obviously, and possibly some other stuff as well (and the thought makes his pale grey flush darker uncomfortably), but really, they’re already close. What more could happen?

Neither of their cultures would ever approve, he admits glumly to himself while his tail slaps languidly at the top of the water, sending ripples over the little circular lake. Santana would be absolutely livid if she ever thought that there was any truth to the shit she talks about Blaine and Kurt together, and Kurt knows full well that she has legitimate reasons to hate the Cecaelia; they all do. And of course, the Cecaelia might actually have a collective heart attack if they found out that one of their own was dating a Galeos. He can’t imagine that any intelligent species would ever actually be okay with one of their own dating a Galeos, honestly. They would pretty much have to be the same species for anyone to ever approve of them being together as a couple.

But then, Kurt has never been one to follow rules when he doesn’t want to. So when Blaine arrives, cheerful as always and smile intact, Kurt knows what he’s going to do. He slides into the water again and beckons his arm at Blaine.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I have something to show you.’

\--

Kurt takes Blaine to the ship. He’d found it weeks ago, just after his tribe had moved into the area and he’d been stunned when he stumbled upon it. It was a ship wreck, some old human structure sunk long ago and half buried in the ground, its huge mass pressing an imprint into the sand beneath it. Although Kurt imagines that it must have once been a beautiful thing it has a long and jagged rent in its side as though some giant beast had ripped a claw right through the wood, and it was overtaken long ago by the moss and seaweed clogging every opening. The ship is dilapidated and abandoned and silent in the gentle movements of the water. Kurt hopes Blaine likes it.

He does. The instant the ship looms into view through the depths of the murky water, Blaine lets out a loud gasp and spins to face Kurt, his face lighting up into a huge grin that covers his entire face.

‘Kurt, _what?’_ he laughs a little disbelievingly.

Kurt shrugs a little awkwardly. ‘I know you love new places, and I know you like your human things, so... I thought you might like this.’

‘I never knew this place was here,’ Blaine babbles as he approaches the ship. ‘I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I never found it.’

Kurt smiles and although he feels a little awkward and embarrassed and exposed, his stomach flutters happily at Blaine’s wide smile and wondering eyes. He knew full well that Blaine would like the ship from the moment he saw it. It’s an old thing with ornate carvings all along the railings and big rooms underneath the deck filled with all sorts of interesting artefacts. Kurt has seen upright ships on top of the ocean before and he knows that this particular ship would have been dignified and proud when its wood was oiled clean and its sail were full; now, the remaining scraps of fabric clinging to the mast float in the slow currents of the water like an eerie mockery of sails flying in the wind.

Blaine and Kurt find themselves in one of the larger rooms at the bottom of the ship where rows of curved banks of fabric hang suspended from the wall. Blaine says that they were likely used for sleep. And as Kurt watches Blaine shuffle about, awkwardly twisting his tentacle around a waterlogged drawer to riffle through its contents eagerly, he pulls his lip between his teeth and wonders how he wants to go about this.

Blaine likes his life. He knows this. Blaine is popular and happy and pretty much free to do whatever he likes, and Kurt would never want to take that away from him. But he’s selfish enough to admit that he wants Blaine with _him_ more than he wants him with anyone else _,_ and god knows none of the Cecaelia would ever allow a union like that. Even if Blaine wanted to be with him in return – and, he reminds himself, there is no guarantee that he does – there would be no way to go about it happily. He takes a deep breath and thinks to himself, _here goes._

‘Blaine,’ Kurt calls and across the room Blaine looks up from the glass in his hand, looks over at Kurt. ‘Can you come here for a moment?’

‘Sure,’ Blaine says. ‘Hey, look at this Kurt, it’s glass but the humans have warped it so that it make everything you see through it _bigger_ – ‘

‘That’s fascinating, Blaine,’ Kurt says gently, ‘but, I – um, actually had something that I wanted to talk to you about.’

Blaine looks away from his glass for a longer time now, looks at Kurt properly, clearly able to hear how nervous Kurt is feeling. His face is open and expressive, completely guileless as he waits for Kurt to speak.

Kurt currently feels as though he’s swallowed a stone for all he can get the words out of his throat. Eventually he manages to say, ‘So over the past few weeks, it’s kind of been drawn to my attention that you are my best friend. And I don’t really know how I feel about it, since I’ve really only known you for maybe a couple of months at most, right? And I really hope that’s not weird, but – ‘

Blaine shakes his head vigorously. ‘No, I feel totally the same!’ he enthuses. ‘It’s weird because there are people back home who I’ve known for my whole life, and I love them and I’d do anything for them, but I don’t think I’ve ever connected with anyone as easily as with you.’ His voice is very earnest.

Kurt breathes out a sigh of relief. ‘That’s great,’ he says slowly. He takes in a deep breath and although he’s starting to panic quite a bit, his heart thudding dangerously against his chest and his tail flicking nervously in the water behind him, he knows that he has to get it all out now before he chickens out completely. ‘It’s just... I was going to say that even though you’re my best friend, you’re not _only_ my best friend.’

Blaine blinks at him and looks like he’s going to say something, but Kurt holds up a palm before he gets the chance. ‘What I’m trying to say, Blaine,’ he says on an outburst of air, ‘is that I have... feelings for you.’

And there it is. Out in the open, as fast and painless as possible, and Kurt even managed to get it out with minimum preamble or walking around the subject. He feels vaguely sick at the thought of Blaine’s reaction (oh God, did a _Galeos_ just ask out a Cecaelia?), but he waits nonetheless for Blaine to speak.

He receives silence. Blaine stares at him, wide eyed with surprise, open mouthed although no sound leaves his lips. The quiet stretches while around them the ship rocks in a phantom of what it had once been, and Kurt bites at his lip and inwardly curses at himself.

He says, ‘Okay, so obviously you don’t feel the same and that’s okay, but I’ve totally made everything awkward now so I’m just going to leave and we can meet up tomorrow or something to talk about it, or we don’t have to if you don’t want to, I mean I get that you might not even want to talk to me anymore, but if you do then – ‘

Kurt is cut off by the feeling of soft lips pressed against his open mouth.

He inhales sharply at the feeling, so unexpected that he actually squeaks out a little before he realises what’s happening, and then –

_Oh._ Blaine is kissing him, Blaine is _kissing him,_ holy hell. His lips are pliable against Kurt’s, open mouthed and sweet, with just the slightest touch of hesitation, almost as though he’s scared of what’s going to happen next. But before long Kurt manages to work his muscles so that he can unfreeze, can kiss Blaine back, and really, Kurt doesn’t know how this all happened so fast.

Kurt pushes into the kiss a bit more and Blaine leans back agreeably, happily passing off the control to Kurt, who brings up a hand to the side of his face and winds a hand in his long curls to pull him closer. He tilts his head to find a new angle and –

‘ _Ouch!’_

Blaine pulls back suddenly in a startled movement and brings a tentacle up to his lip. It comes away with blood on the tip.

‘I... I think your teeth cut me,’ Blaine says slowly.

Kurt and Blaine both stare as the water catches the blood from the tip of the tentacle, siphoning a trail of brownish colouring into the water while they sit, dumbfounded at the revelation.

And then they’re laughing suddenly and it’s the most cathartic release of emotions, because as ridiculous as the whole situation is, Kurt can’t help but feel so relieved. It rattles in his mind like a child bouncing off the walls that Blaine actually did kiss him back. He’s not making that up. He’s not being over the top. Blaine really did kiss him back. It warms him like the sunlight he feels at the surface of the water, and he doesn’t know if Blaine was just reacting to the emotions of the moment or if he really does feel the same way Kurt does, but from the way the way that Blaine is staring at him right now, open and amazed and as though he truly can’t believe what just happened, he would bet anything that it’s the latter.

Blaine exhales a deep breath. ‘Wow,’ he says.

Kurt nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Wow.’

Blaine pulls his lip between his teeth and averts his eyes, his cheeks filling with colour. Kurt watches him with fond eyes. Blaine says hesitantly, ‘Did you mean what you said before I – I kissed you?’

Kurt smiles. ‘What, that I have feelings for you? Of course.’

‘Wow,’ Blaine says again.

They sit quietly for a moment, side by side on one of those strange lengths of fabric, and Blaine is so close to him that he can feel his heat, solid and calming against Kurt’s side.

Eventually, Blaine leans his head on Kurt shoulder and says, ‘So, what next?’

Kurt asks, ‘Do you... feel the same way about me?’

‘Yeah,’ Blaine says quietly. ‘I don’t think I realised it until just now. But – yes.’

‘I don’t want to hide it,’ Kurt says quietly, resting his head in turn on top of Blaine’s. ‘My tribe might not care so much, but your community... they would totally freak. But I don’t want to hide it.’

Blaine shows his latent agreement in his silence. He mumbles, ‘My friends are going to totally freak.’

‘Well,’ Kurt reasons, ‘It’s either that or hide it, just like we’ve been hiding – well, sort of – this whole relationship from our people. Does that sound like a better idea to you?’

 ‘No,’ Blaine sighs. ‘Okay, fine. We’ll do it.’ He smiles at Kurt sweetly. ‘If it means getting to spend more time with you – especially _like that –_ then I’ll take it.’

\--

Predictably, when the reef finds out about Kurt and Blaine's relationship – because of course when one person finds out, the whole reef does – the whole place is horrified.  
  
It's Tina who uncovers their relationship first. Blaine supposes that she must enjoy playing detective, because it had eventually been she who realised that there was something different about Blaine's outings these days, something in the way his mood is always better when he returns and how he tends to spend more time out of the reef these days than in. She'd followed him on one of his trips to the cave and apparently when she'd seen Kurt enter only minutes later, she'd been terrified. She'd been convinced that he was going to die in there, she recounts to him later, talking too fast and too loud to be truly understandable. She'd watched this Galeos very purposefully enter this little opening that she'd just seen Blaine go into - and they hadn't come out for a long time.  
  
Tina had been near hysterical when she'd confronted Blaine about it immediately after, and he'd been forced to tell her the truth of the matter just to get her to quiet down. It probably wasn't the smartest thing – when she'd realised that the Galeos wasn't eating him, but rather the opposite, her screeching had immediately started up again. And Tina has always been notorious for her gossipy mouth. By the end of the day, the whole reef is talking about it.

He meets up with Kurt the very next day to talk about it.

'So they know now,' he opens the conversation with.

'They know now,' Kurt confirms. 'Santana could smell it on me, I swear, she figured it out approximately two seconds after I entered the caves the other day. I think she has some kind of psychic ability that told her what was going to happen  _before_ you kissed me.'

He looks at the ground and Blaine tilts his head to watch him properly. 'She's not speaking to me anymore,’ he says. ‘She actually called me a traitor, can you believe that?  _Traitor.'_

Blaine runs a tentacle over his back sympathetically. 'She doesn't know what she's talking about,' he comforts. 'She doesn't understand.'

'Well I know that,' Kurt says dolefully. 'It just... it sucks, I guess, to have one of your best friends turn on you, and then go ahead and make sure your  _other_ best friend isn't speaking to you either.'

Blaine understands that all too well. Ever since the news came out that he was dating a Galeos, most people in the reef quite literally refuse to come near him. He doesn’t understand quite why exactly, but he’s beginning to get the idea that they think he has somehow inherited Kurt’s dangerous tendencies – like he will attack them – _eat them_ – if they come near enough. His parents had been absolutely furious about the whole thing, which had resulted in a huge blow out argument between the three of them. They’d asked, again and again, what was so special about _this_ Galeos that Blaine would risk his life to spend his time with him, especially when there are so many ‘more appropriate’ options living right here in the reef. And though Blaine had blustered and stuttered, he hadn’t been able to get a proper answer out. He’d only be able to say, helplessly with shrugged shoulders, ‘I don’t know. I just... don’t know.’

Tina had been next, with Artie nervously shadowing her much angrier form. She’d flat out yelled at him while he shrunk back, cowed and trying not to fade too far into the background. ‘You do understand that one day soon he is going to turn on you and eat you?’ she’d snapped furiously. ‘ _Eat you,_ Blaine. You’re going to end up that pretty little shark’s _dinner.’_ She’d given him a disgusted look. ‘And if you can’t see that then frankly, maybe you deserve to be eaten.’

She hadn’t spoken to Blaine since.

Mike had approached Blaine soon after Tina had stormed off, much more quiet and measured, speaking calmly and earnestly while Blaine had played insolently with the shells in the sand, refusing to meet his eyes. ‘I know it might not seem this way right now,’ he had said, ducking his head to try and get Blaine to look at him, ‘but Galeos are dangerous creatures, Blaine, you know how much study has been done on them. They’re... violent and impulsive.’ He’d shrugged. ‘Who knows, maybe this shark of yours really does love you. But what about when he gets angry? What if he gets violent? What happens then? He could really hurt you, Blaine. Or worse. Just – think about that, would you?’ Then he’d rubbed a little at Blaine’s drooped shoulders and left him alone again. That had been the last time anyone in the reef had even approached him. For a social creature like Blaine, it feels like a lifetime.

Some of the things his friends had said had made honest sense to him. He’d even been given pause when Mike had mentioned all of the studies that the Cecaelia had done on the violent tendencies of Galeos. But then, he’d reminded himself, Cecaelia don’t know everything. It’s not like there’s anything on record about Cecaelia eating _sharks._ And anyway – and now he’s getting more indignant about the whole thing – it’s not like Cecaelia are necessarily _right_ anyway. Like we know anything when we can’t even see anything through our own biases?

With Kurt’s warm body beside him and his head resting on his shoulder, hair tickling his neck, nothing feels so right.

‘We can wait it out,’ Blaine sighs, and beside him Kurt shifts a little on his seat. ‘They’ll get used to it eventually, right? They’ll realise that you’re not going to turn psycho on me and eat me up?’

‘Yeah,’ Kurt agrees. ‘They’ll get used to it. They have to.’

\--

They don’t get used to it.

It becomes clear to Kurt, when weeks stretch into a month and then more, that the attitudes of both the Galeos and the Cecaelia are too deeply ingrained to allow them to accept the idea of two of their kind, shockingly, getting along. It doesn’t take long before the Galeos start getting aggressive about it. Kurt hadn’t thought that they would care so much, had been sure that they would maybe raise their eyebrows a little before moving on with life as normal, just as they always do. But their tribe is small and close and even if some of them give nothing more than a baffled shrug before forgetting about it completely, others take more offence than Kurt would have thought possible.

Santana spearheads the attack. She pretty much refuses to acknowledge his presence now unless forced to and Puck follows suit, awkwardly avoiding his eyes when he tries to start a conversation and making excuses to leave the scene as soon as possible. He’s not close to anybody else in the tribe and the loneliness is sharp and bitter at the back of his throat; Kurt had always thought that he was good at being alone all the time, but now that the only person he has left is Blaine himself, it doesn’t appear to be the case. He remembers his thought from weeks earlier, that the only way any would accept them was if they were the same species. Apparently not as hyperbolic as one might have thought.

Kurt wants to snap at Santana again and again that whatever Kurt and Blaine choose to do in private is their own business and only theirs and she just needs to get over it and butt the hell out, but he knows her well enough to realise that that would only spur her on. She begins to spit barbs at him whenever he comes near, won’t speak a civil word to him, is as spiteful as an angered orca. Out of all of them, Santana always did hate the Cecaelia the most. She takes Kurt dating one as a personal affront, doesn’t even try to understand it. Kurt begins to hate going back home for fear that she will be there to shoot more vitriol at him, a whole quiver of arrows collected over the day, shoots him with questions about whether he and Blaine fuck, how it would be possible, how awful it would be to imagine. She takes malicious pleasure in making him feel horrible about himself, and he finds himself desperately wishing for his best friend back, the one he knows is hiding underneath her injured armour.

Everything comes to a head when Kurt goes to meet Blaine at the cave one day, and Blaine is late.

He waits in the damp quiet of the cave, taps his fingers impatiently against the rocky ground, watches the light above him fade while he waits. And when Blaine arrives twenty minutes past time, even the dark can’t hide his face.

Kurt gasps loudly. Blaine winces.

‘I was hoping it would be dark enough that you wouldn’t notice,’ he mutters.

‘Blaine...’ Kurt is speechless. ‘What – what happened?’

His handsome face is marred by a single purple bruise, stretching right along the left side of his face, down over his eye and to the corner of his nose. Half his lid has swollen shot, turning his face lopsided and as Kurt watches, he winces when swallowing pulls his temples tight. He looks awful.

Blaine is silent for a long moment. Eventually, he mutters, ‘Santana found me.’

 ‘ _What_?’ Kurt snaps immediately. He feels the cold rush up his spine like icy water at the thought – the thought that she had – _what did she do_? ‘Blaine,’ he says, forcibly calm though his voice shakes. ‘Blaine, what did Santana do?’

Blaine shrugs and looks down, hiding his face from Kurt. He doesn’t seem hurt anywhere else, thankfully, but the way he holds himself, tense and closed off, tells Kurt everything he needs to know. ‘She didn’t do much,’ he says tightly. ‘Just, you know, pushed me a little bit. She’s, um, a lot stronger than me.’

‘ _Blaine,’_ Kurt says and reaches for Blaine’s hand. He keeps in the sigh of relief when Blaine doesn’t try to pull away, but instead only grips tighter. ‘How did you get that bruise? How did she find you? _Why_?’

‘Oh, come on, Kurt!’ Blaine laughs mirthlessly. ‘You know full well _why._ And – there were rocks, nearby.’

‘God,’ Kurt whispers. ‘I’m sorry, Blaine. I’m – I’m so sorry.’

Blaine’s twisted smile is in no way humorous. ‘ _You_ didn’t do anything at all,’ he says.

Kurt is fed up. He’s frustrated and angry and annoyed that he can no longer sit amongst his own tribe without snide comments being directed at him. He would have expected it from pretty much anyone else – but not the same people he grew up with. And he is furious, blindingly so, that Santana would dare go to the lengths she has, would dare _harm_ his Blaine, his sweet and fundamentally harmless Blaine, purely out of spite. The rage is like ice, cracking and freezing along his veins. He knows, simply and honestly, that he’s not going to deal with it anymore. Maybe one day Santana would thaw – she normally does, after all. But why should Kurt, who is so patient so often, sometimes he feels nothing but put up with her shit – why should he deal with it when his _boyfriend,_ the person he _loves_ – and the term comes so easily and naturally to him that he doesn’t question it at all – is getting hurt because of a vindictive friend? He shouldn’t _have_ to deal with it. He _won’t,_ he downright _refuses_ to deal with it. And when he tries to think of solutions, there is only one that seems even a little possible to him.

It’s absolutely drastic. Downright stupid, really. There’s _probably_ a smarter way to go about it. Even if Blaine agreed, there’s almost definitely a better solution. But Kurt has been fighting a long time for his right to simply do what he _wants,_ and frankly he doesn’t _want_ to find a better solution, because he shouldn’t have to.

The more he thinks about it, the saner it sounds. He turns to Blaine, who looks at him through that one swollen lid, and feels his heart jump to his throat. He says, ‘Come with me. I have something I want to talk to you about.’

 Kurt takes him to the ship where they had first kissed. It’s there, immutable as always, a ghostly giant dredged into the sand, and Kurt feels his nerves rising when he sees it. Behind him, Blaine follows silently. He hasn’t spoken a single word throughout the trip, apparently able to sense the seriousness of the situation.

Kurt takes him back to the room underneath the ship, the one with all the long stretches of fabric, and pats for Blaine to sit beside him when he settles down.

He’s blunt about it.

‘I don’t think this is working out,’ he says, and when Blaine’s eyes widen and he jerks backward, Kurt quickly reaches out to grab his tentacle between his hands, anchor him to the ground. ‘Not us! I’ve never been more sure about _us.’_

Blaine slowly settles back into place and his eyebrows lower. He rests his head on Kurt’s shoulder. ‘Then what?’ he asks slowly.

Kurt sighs. He says, ‘Blaine, I am _so_ sick of all the judgement coming towards us these days. I’ve been dealing with this kind of hatred everywhere I go, all my life, but now my own _tribe_ hates me too, and I don’t know if I can deal with that. This whole thing is just another reason for the whole world to hate me. To hate us.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Blaine says, mouth twisting in sympathy.

Kurt smiles at him. ‘It’s hardly _your_ fault,’ he says. ‘I – what Santana did, that was unacceptable.’ He reaches out a hand to brush along Blaine’s bruise, just barely swollen at the edges. He bites his lip, feels the anger course again. ‘Look at your beautiful face,’ he says softly. ‘God, Blaine. I just really don’t want to deal with it anymore.’

 ‘So what do you propose we do?’ Blaine asks softly and though he doesn’t move his head from Kurt’s shoulder, Kurt can feel how his body has gone tense.

Kurt takes a deep breath. In his mind, he keeps telling himself that everything will be okay. ‘I know what I’m about to say sounds completely and utterly insane,’ he says as a preface, pulling back from Blaine so that the two of them can face each other properly. Blaine straightens up and gives Kurt his full attention. Kurt goes on, ‘Look, no matter what happens, nobody is ever going to accept the idea of the two of us being together when we’re so different to one another. I mean, it’s just not going to happen, is it? Not unless we... are the same. Right?’

‘Okay...’ Blaine says slowly. ‘I’m not sure I know what you’re getting at here.’

Kurt bites his lip. ‘When we were coming to the reef, we came across a city of merpeople,’ he begins. Blaine’s eyes immediately widen and although Kurt can imagine what Blaine is going to say, he hurries on, ‘They’re well hidden; I’m not surprised that the Cecaelia don’t know that they’re there. But the point is – ‘

Come on, Kurt. Just spit it out.

All in one breath, he rushes out, ‘Theyhavemagicalpowersandtheycanmakeushuman.’

Blaine blinks. ‘I’m sorry?’

Exaggeratedly slow, ‘They have magical powers, and they can make us human.’

Blaine laughs. He actually laughs, his face splitting into a huge grin at even the thought of it, until he looks at Kurt’s serious face and realises that he isn’t joking at all. Then he sobers alarming quickly and his face turns incredulous. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he says.

‘I am,’ Kurt says flatly through pressed lips.

‘Kurt – that’s insane,’ Blaine says.

‘But it’s not, don’t you see?’ Kurt says, grabbing at one of Blaine’s tentacles to hold between both of his hands. Behind him, his tail begins flicking faster in his anxiety. ‘Because you love humans, I’ve heard you wax poetic about them pretty much from the moment I met you. And you with your curiosity – ‘ he shrugs. ‘Think of all the things you could learn about humans if you were actually one of them.’

‘Okay, but.’ Blaine shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it so he can understand what he’s hearing better. ‘Okay, but if this whole thing is about becoming the same so that everyone will accept us, why don’t we just change one of us to fit the others’ species? Wouldn’t that make more sense?’

‘Sure, if you want _everyone_ to know what we did, and then judge us for _that_ as well,’ Kurt says.

Blaine is silent.

Kurt moves closer to him, so close that even in the dimmest light of the ship, he can still see Blaine’s face, Blaine’s beautiful eyes. And that horrid bruise, that undeniable mark of hatred. ‘I want to do this, Blaine,’ he whispers. ‘I really do. Think of it like an adventure. Or – ‘ His mouth twitches, ‘a research project. And we can always change back if we ever want to, you know?’

For another long moment, Blaine doesn’t say anything at all. Then, after a minute that stretches Kurt’s anxiety to its final string, he breathes, ‘I wonder what it’s going to be like only having two legs.’

Kurt can’t believe what he’s hearing. The elation shocks through his body as he takes Blaine’s words and then he can’t keep in the squeal, can’t quite stop his tail from flicking so fast in his excitement that it actually propels him upward a couple of feet before he can control himself once more. ‘Yes!’ he cries, tugging Blaine into a tight hug that Blaine immediately returns, squeezing hard at his back. ‘Oh my god, I’m going to have _legs,_ this is going to be so _weird – ‘_

_\--_

It takes them maybe two hours to travel from the ship to where Kurt says the merpeople’s city will be. Blaine has never been so far away from home before and with every push of his tentacles he feels his nerves building. Some part of him still literally cannot believe that they’re actually doing this, that he’s actually going along with Kurt’s ridiculous, crazy, utterly insane idea, and in his mind he wrestles between turning back and going forward. But he knows of course, that it was never really a question. He was always going to go with Kurt. And when he thinks about Santana’s cold face, the utter _terror_ that those few moments with her had brewed while she invaded his space, his privacy, manipulated his emotions – he knows that he’s making the right decision.

The merpeople city is low and sprawling across the flat plateau of the deeper ocean floor, a mad criss-crossing tangle of low huts and larger buildings made out of rough cut stone. It stretches as far as Blaine can see and he can’t quite believe that he lives just a couple of hours away and yet he didn’t know about this entire civilisation of hybrids living right at his doorstep. But then, he thinks to himself, merpeople and their cousins, the Sirens, are the only known humanoids with magical powers. He supposes that they have a lot of abilities that the Cecaelia know nothing about.

They enter the city and as they begin to make their way through the huts, mermaids and mermen begin to appear, a procession to line their way as they silently watch the two of them swim. Blaine wonders if it would be presumptuous to hold Kurt’s hand, pressing closer to his side at the merpeople’s silent stares. As beautiful as they are, there is something unsettling about the way they watch without a word, letting them pass without even turning their heads. It makes Blaine feel as though he’s on death row.

Kurt whispers to Blaine, ‘Stop worrying. I know a girl here who can help up out.’ He wrinkles his nose. ‘Well, Santana does, anyway.’

He leads Blaine through the houses, seemingly knowing where he’s going, and he stops at one of the most run-down buildings in the entire place. The hut has no door, only a dark hole and when Kurt raps his knuckles against the stone to announce their presence, two people appear almost immediately.

Blaine’s first impression is that they’re very blonde. His second is that they’ve very attractive and possibly the most quintessential image of a mermaid that he could have ever imagined. The first is a man with a shock of scraggly hair floating somewhere near his exceptionally well defined shoulders. His eyes are blue and his lips are thick and his tail is fishlike just like Kurt’s, but where Kurt’s is a smooth slate grey this man’s is covered in layers of iridescent blue scales, lying flat on top of one another to smooth into a long and tapered end. The second person looks remarkably similar to the first, although her face is more delicate and her hair longer. She’s bare chested and her slim waist slips smoothly into a purple tail, scaled just like the man’s.

Blaine looks at the two of them, looks at their open curious faces, and he can’t help but feel that they are essentially innocent, somewhere deep in their core. He wonders if that’s how all merpeople are.

Although the man only looks at Kurt blankly, the woman clearly recognises him. When she sees him, she breaks into a wide smile and pulls him into a hug. She says, ‘Kurt, I’ve been waiting for you to come back!’

She turns to Blaine. ‘Is this your special friend, Kurt?’

‘Oh, I’m Blaine,’ Blaine says quickly, moving forward to hold out a tentacle for her to shake, a habit he’d picked up from Kurt. She ignores it completely in favour of moving forward for a hug of his own. She doesn’t even seem to notice his bruise. ‘I’m Brittany S. Pierce,’ she introduces herself. ‘It’s very nice to meet you, Kurt’s special friend.’

Behind her, the man is introducing himself to Kurt as, ‘Sam, bro, it’s nice to meet you.’ He holds out a closed fist for Kurt to apparently bump and Kurt does so hesitantly.

‘Now,’ Brittany says, pulling back from Blaine and clapping her hands together. ‘I know why you’re here.’

Blaine watches her and the more he watches the more he finds himself confused at the peculiar way she holds herself, the way she says her words. Almost as though she says them with no true knowledge of the words themselves, as though she is reciting them from a script, flat and wooden. She looks at Blaine and he sees intelligence, but also a vapidness that works in direct contradiction to that. He can’t make sense of it any way he looks at it.

‘Brittany is a mage, Blaine,’ Kurt interrupts Blaine’s thoughts to explain. ‘They’re very rare, but very powerful.’

Blaine has heard of mages before. Incredibly unusual and notoriously unstable, with constantly fluctuating tempers and moods, they are even more alien than humans themselves. Although magical properties are almost always found in merpeople, Blaine has heard stories of sea witches from other species before, like Cecaelia, and even a tale about a Selkie who could melt her icy homeland with just a thought. Mages have the power to change the shape of the earth. Blaine doesn’t doubt that if they wanted to, all the mages of the world would be able to rule the land and the sea with little trouble. And more importantly, mages infamously have the power to change the very shape of a person’s being – to make them what they are not. If prompted, they can turn someone human. Blaine doesn’t know how he feels about the power being in the hands of this ditzy girl.

‘I am a mage!’ Brittany says with a bright grin. ‘And as a mage, I know why you’re here. And my answer is yes.’ She smiles, innocent as anything.

‘R-really?’ Kurt stutters out as Blaine’s confusion only grows. ‘You’ll do it? Are you sure?’

Behind Brittany, Sam exchanges a mystified glance with Blaine.

‘I’ve been watching your tribe in my waters,’ Brittany explains, ‘and I know that you want to be together, but you can’t.’ She shrugs and says plainly, ‘Just like I could never be with my Santana if I wanted to. But I can help you, so I will.’ She looks at Blaine and then back at Kurt, and says with conviction, ‘I’ll help you be together.’

‘Right now?’ Kurt breathes out.

‘Yeah, totally, when else?’ Brittany says, blinking innocently.

Inside the hut, the walls are lined with shelves just like Blaine saw in the ship earlier that day, and each shelf is full of all manner of things that Brittany pulls haphazardly off the walls as she goes. Sam hurries to place a rough, wide rimmed bowl in the middle of the room, apparently familiar with Brittany’s antics, collecting her ingredients as she tugs them down. When she’s done, she settles in the middle of the room before the bowl, her ingredients lined up before her while she tucks her tail underneath her.

Blaine wonders if she actually knows what she’s doing. He doesn’t like to judge, but he can’t help but feel that she’s a little ditzy, and mage or not, he doesn’t know if he trusts her to make them human. But Kurt doesn’t say anything as she starts mixing ingredients together in a bowl – and he swears he sees some really questionable stuff in there, was that a _foot_? – and even if he doesn’t completely trust Brittany, he knows that he trusts Kurt.

Before long, Brittany’s concoction starts to bubble and fizz in a vaguely menacing sense, frothing dark purple liquids and sending up spits of smoke and Blaine doesn’t even know where the smoke is coming from because fire cannot live in water, but it’s there. Sam has faded back to one of the corners, apparently content to only watch, and Kurt steadily grows closer to Blaine’s side, apparently nervous though he doesn’t want to show it. Brittany’s hair is beginning to draw up around her face, thick strands weaving like living creatures in the water around her. And then Brittany drinks the potion and when she opens her eyes, the sweet blue of her irises has been erased and suddenly her eyes are the same colour as the potion had been – a vivid, glowing purple.

She begins chanting, words that Blaine couldn’t hope to understand. She throws her arms out wide and tips her head back to the decrepit ceiling of the little hut, but still her eyes remain fixed on Blaine and Kurt on the other side of the room. He feels terrified at how otherworldly she looks. And as she continues, Blaine begins to feel – dizzy, all of a sudden, like he can’t keep his tentacles straight underneath him. The world has begun to go dark around him, black smears across his vision, and he reaches out to squeeze at Kurt’s hand, pulling him as close to his side as possible.

This is really happening, he thinks faintly to himself. This is really happening.

He can’t see Sam anymore. Why can’t he see Sam? But no, the whole room is beginning to disappear as Blaine’s vision fades and he can _feel_ it, he can literally _feel_ his body beginning to change, and still the room is fading, and all he can see are Brittany’s eyes, those strange and alien eyes, and he can only feel Kurt’s hand, ever tighter than his. And below his waist he can’t feel anything at all.

And then he blacks out and the last thing he sees is Brittany’s eyes, burned into his vision like the sun. Those beautiful eyes.


	3. Epilogue

When they wake, the ground beneath them is dry and gritty and the sun beating down on them is harsh against Kurt’s skin. He feels mostly the same, he thinks, running a quick inventory over his body. Kind of stiff, like his joints are glued together, but okay. He reaches a hand up to check himself over. His head feels the same, his chest is fine, his waist, his… Christ.

Kurt’s eyes snap open at the shock of two legs where had previously been his tail. Above him, the sun is bright enough to make his eyes ache and the sand beneath his cheek squeaks when he moves. He lifts his hand in front of his face and for a moment he thinks that the bleached pink of his skin is a side effect of the brightness making him squint, but no, his skin really is no longer grey. He pushes himself upright on two – blessedly unchanged – arms, looks down at himself. His entire body is smaller, a little less muscled, and where his tail once was, two legs have appeared, long and white and with a joint in the middle that bends in half. God, he has  _feet._ They are bizarre. He has  _toes._

Despite the strangeness of the situation, Kurt feels surprisingly calm about the whole thing. He tells himself that nothing went wrong, that everything happened that was supposed to happen – he feels a spike of relief when he realises how easily they could have drowned down in the ocean. Despite Brittany’s brilliance, Kurt knows placing them on land is exactly the sort of detail she would have missed in her absentmindedness, and he makes a mental note to thank Sam when he next sees him.  _If_ he next sees him.

Beside him is Blaine. Blaine, who is no longer that deep orange colour, but rather a lovely tan, though Kurt notes that Blaine is still darker than him. But Blaine has hands now, wide and knobbly where smooth lengths of tentacle once was, and below his waist… he’s human. No broad spread of tentacles extending out from underneath him, no strangely disconnected movements that Kurt had become so used to. Instead there are simply two legs, just like Kurt’s own, still and prone along the sand. His face is unchanged, lax and untroubled as he sleeps, and Kurt finds himself staring at him; the lovely little crook of his nose, those ridiculously endearing eyebrows. Amusingly, his hair is dry for possibly the first time, and it’s frizzed right up into a giant mass of tangles instead of his usual lazy curls. He’s still beautiful. He wishes he could see Blaine’s familiar eyes.

They’re human. It’s a strange feeling.

Kurt shifts one leg, and then the other. He wiggles his toes. He bends the joints in the middle of his leg so that his feet lie flat against the sand. For the first time in his life, no part of his body is in contact with water. His skin is dry and the hairs on his arm raise light and thin.

Blaine’s eyelids begin twitching after about ten minutes and Kurt’s fascination with his own new body immediately snaps to him. Blaine moans quietly, his hands shifting in the sand beneath him, and his legs jerk. At that, Blaine’s eyes snap wide open and he pushes himself up quickly on his hands – his  _hands –_ to look down the length of his body. The whole thing is an almost comical imitation of Kurt’s actions just minutes before.

‘Doin’ alright there?’ Kurt asks in a rasping, tired voice. Blaine looks over at him, obviously only just realising that he’s there, and his eyes widen as he takes in Kurt’s physique. Kurt shifts self consciously as Blaine’s eyes travel down his body, eventually fixating on his legs. He blinks several times.

‘Wow,’ he says after several long moments.

He looks back at himself, at his legs and then his hips, then back up at Kurt. He indicates between his legs and says mock innocently, because they both know full well what lies there, ‘Kurt, I think they left a little bit of tentacle behind.’

‘Pervert,’ Kurt smirks.

Blaine’s eyes drift back to Kurt’s face and he smiles slowly, sweetly. ‘Your eyes are different,’ he says. ‘They’re not black anymore, they’re... blue. And green, and grey. They look like the ocean.’

Kurt blinks and bites at his lip as his cheeks rush pink. And then Blaine laughs and says, ‘Oh my god, your teeth, they – ‘

‘What about my teeth?’ Kurt says, suddenly panicked. He runs a tongue over the ridges, feels for anything abnormal, but as far as he can tell they’re as flat and herbivorous as any human’s. ‘Are they still sharp? Oh my god, do I look like a total freak - ?’

‘No, no, they’re flat,’ Blaine assures him. ‘They just... they kind of look like baby shark teeth. It’s adorable.’

‘Oh,’ Kurt says.

Blaine looks around him and pats at the packed sand a little bit. He shrugs at Kurt. ‘Wanna try walking?’

Kurt grins. ‘Let’s do it.’

It turns out that walking is far more difficult than either of them had imagined.

‘Bipedal – makes –  _no sense.’_ Blaine grunts at one point, his face screwed up in concentration as he wobbles precariously, his legs trembling violently while he reaches down to hold onto Kurt’s shoulders for support where Kurt sits, breathing hard and taking a break. Kurt doesn’t have a clue what the word means, imagines Blaine learnt it amongst discussion with his irritating brethren, but he understands the sentiment all the same.

They manage it eventually though, with much strategy and precision entailed, leaning heavily on each other for balance while they take their first steps – and immediately go toppling back to the ground again. Kurt is almost relieved, because the ground had looked a very long way away from all the way up there. He lays back on the ground to stare up at the sky. ‘Maybe we should just sit for a while,’ he suggests.

‘Slacker,’ Blaine teases, but before Kurt has the chance to fire back a retort, they’re interrupted by an unfamiliar voice.

‘Excuse me? Hey! This is not a nudist colony! What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

Striding towards them across the sand, hands held firmly on her hips, is a human woman with long brown hair and a very severe expression on her face as she comes to a halt in front on them. Her face is pretty, with a large nose and lovely eyes, but Kurt is immediately confused by the strange wraps all over her body, although she leaves her arms and face and most of her legs uncovered. He can’t imagine for the life of him the use of them. Through Kurt’s shock at seeing her, at seeing a human for the very first time (and god she is not nearly as intimidating as all the tales they’ve been told about these creatures) he still manages to be jealous at the effortless way that she marches across the sand. He opens his mouth to speak, but his voice is stuck in his throat. Beside him, Blaine is similarly shell shocked.

The woman begins tapping her nails impatiently against her hips and when neither of them is forthcoming with an answer to her question, staring at her with wide eyes, she huffs out an irritated breath. ‘You do realise that what you are doing is illegal, right? And that I could – and am planning to – sue you for daring to disgrace this beach with – with – well, that?’ Her gaze flicks downward and then back up again, and she turns her head away delicately as her nose wrinkles.

Kurt glances at Blaine, flummoxed, but Blaine seems equally confused. Not something that he’s learned about before, then.

Blaine speaks first. He asks tentatively, ‘I’m sorry, but who are you?’

‘Rachel Berry,’ the woman says instantaneously. ‘And you?’

‘I’m – Blaine,’ Blaine says hesitantly. He gestures to Kurt. ‘And this is Kurt.’

Rachel tilts her head as she watches them. Eventually, she asks, ‘I’m sorry to be rude, but are you two inebriated?’

Blaine blinks. So does Kurt.

‘I... don’t think so?’ Blaine says carefully.

Rachel rolls her eyes. ‘Well did either of you have a drink last night? Or...’ She eyes them, wobbling on the ground. ‘Several?’

‘We drink water all the time,’ Kurt pipes up, viscerally glad that finally she’s said something that he can possibly understand. Rachel stares at him.

‘We’re very sorry, miss,’ Blaine says. ‘We didn’t mean to cause any trouble. We’ll be gone right away.’

‘Wait!’ Rachel says. ‘Look, as much as I disapprove of your proclivities – ‘ and again she glances down and looks away with a sniff – ‘you don’t appear to have clothes anywhere near you and I can hardly let you travel out without, um, some cover ups. You can come back to my beach cabin and we can get some of my boyfriend’s old clothes for you, how about that?’

Kurt blinks several times rapidly. He glances across at Blaine, who looks just as worried as he feels. He doesn’t want to go with this strangely intense woman, doesn’t want to go anywhere except with Blaine. But – well, if they want to be a part of the human race then they can hardly avoid their own new species forever. They have so much to learn, so much that they don’t know, and they’re hardly going to pass as normal adult humans in this world if they don’t even know the bare basics of being human. So maybe they should go with this woman. They could learn a lot from her even in just a few moments, if they’re careful about it. Hell, maybe they could even go so far as to tell them what happened to them, see if they could get an ally on their side to help them more directly. She might freak out, but... she might not. And as he stares at Blaine, he can see that Blaine has come to the same conclusion that he has. Maybe it’s not perfect, maybe it’ll all snowball into a giant disaster the moment they let it, but maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, they can work this whole thing out just fine. They’ll go with this Rachel lady.

There’s a lot they need to know about being human and at this rate it’ll take years for them to figure it all out. But they need to make a start, and they have a possibly friendly ally standing right in front of them. So they’ll go with Rachel, and hopefully she’ll help them.

They can start with ‘clothes’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and/or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading. <3


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